


Wolf's Price

by hilaryfaye



Category: Original Work
Genre: F/F, Fantasy, High Fantasy, M/M, Multi, Queer Fantasy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2018-10-22
Packaged: 2019-01-01 01:37:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 15
Words: 83,707
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12145815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hilaryfaye/pseuds/hilaryfaye
Summary: To the people around her, Lya is only the mistress of a war hero, the man who killed the king of Saren and ended the war between their kingdoms. What they do not know is how close to that decisive moment Lya was, or the role she played in it. Lya has spent the seven years since the end of the war hiding in Kressos, concealing her past and her identity. Now, circumstance pulls her back to Saren, to the place where the king was murdered, and as Lya returns to the nation she once called home, she begins to hear the call of something bigger and more powerful than any king: that of the Winter Wolf.





	1. I. A Nothing Name

**Author's Note:**

> “The Sarenns, at their heart a superstitious people, are especially fearful of white wolves. Beyond simply the fear of bodily harm, they believe white wolves to have a special connection to their animal devil the _Vintervulgas_ , or Winter Wolf, the incarnation of winter and a creature so fearsome that to speak his proper name— _Vull_ —aloud is to summon him and his pack down from the ice, and to suffer whatever torment they may wreak…  
> “For those that do call down the Winter Wolf, it is believed that the god exacts a price for speaking his name. Most commonly in Sarenn lore, that price is the speaker’s life.”  
> Herrin Kellar, _An Account of the Myth and Folklore of Saren_

Naturalists say that all life comes from a single source, that we are as much kin with the trees of the forest and the fish of the sea as our own kind. I am not a naturalist, and I do not truly understand it, but I suppose it must be true. Certainly, the Sarenn know that the land is a part of them, that we are not Sarenn without the land.

When I was small, my grandmother told me that the people of Saren came from the same earth as other folk, but we took the northern wind into our lungs and the meat of the forests into our bellies and we were changed.

Many people have come to call Saren home. First, there were the Hasi, the mammoth-followers. Among the Hasi there are several nations, but by the Kressosi they are considered to be the same. Other Sarenn are more likely to know their names, if not the nuances of their cultures.

After the Hasi came many peoples, whose names I will not trouble you with, as these days all will identify themselves simply as ‘Sarenn,’ and they are not the same peoples they were before they came. Some wandered, and some farmed. Whether they came from the south, the east, or from west across the water, all people who settled in what would become Saren were changed.

My grandmother said it was because of the gods. That is what the Kressosi most despise about us, you see—the gods. They are in the very air, water, and land. They were here before there were folk, and they will be here after there are folk, when there is nothing but ice, and wind, and snow.

The one that my people fear most, above all others, we call only the Winter Wolf.

In the summer he hunts on the ice, when the sun never ceases shining, and when night falls on the ice he brings winter to Saren, in howling winds and driving snow. He is a giant. His fur glitters blinding bright like fresh-fallen snow under the noonday sun. His teeth are ice. His eyes are as red as blood upon the snow.

He is the frost of death, and he is the greatest shield against Kressosi invaders Saren has ever had.

For centuries he protected us.

Until one winter, when he didn’t. 

#

“You shouldn’t have brought me here,” I murmured.

“Nonsense,” Muras replied, putting his hand on my waist, “many men bring their mistresses.”

“Their mistresses are Kressosi.” I had felt the weight of the eyes on my back since we had arrived, smelled the jealousy on their breaths.

Muras leaned in, so that his lips brushed across my cheek, because he knew it distracted me. “You have as much right to be here as any of them.”

If anyone ought to have been there, it should have been Todd, but he had begged it off, preferring to dine with his sister and her husband, because he disliked royal events. (Todd said this was why he had left the army, so that he wouldn’t be obliged to attend.)

Muras had purchased a new dress for me to wear, in a deep red that flattered my complexion, and I hadn’t felt like I could refuse, but I didn’t want to be there. All those hateful eyes on my back, flinching when they accidentally met my gaze.

I knew from whispers that were meant to be overheard what they thought of me. Muras was too handsome, of too good a station, to waste himself on a Sarenn slut. He ought to take a proper Kressosi wife, stop wasting his money on a mistress. What could Commander Emiran, the man who slew the Sarenn king, want with me?

They hated that he had the gall to openly keep a Sarenn mistress, and treat her well.

A steward struck a chime, drawing the attention of the hall. The Kressosi struck me as so austere in their decor, those plain white walls with their gilt edges, not a tapestry or mural to be found. There was nothing for the shadows of the candles to dance over but a barren waste of paint.

The steward stood at attention, hands clasped behind his back, silver buttons glinting on his coat. “His Grace the Crown Prince of Kressos, Prince Andon, and Her Grace the Princess Arabel.”

There was a shift in the room, a stillness. Breath held in anticipation, in anxiety. I checked my posture, and as Muras dropped his arm from my waist so he could stand at attention, I fell half a step behind him, tried to make myself less noticeable.

Prince Andon was a young man, yet, only just thirty, with a spoiled, soft face and hair the color of new leather. He arrived in attendance with his wife, the Princess Arabel, whose beauty only made her husband’s inadequate looks more obvious. Dark curly hair, a face the glowing ruddy brown of polished mahogany—she would be a popular queen, when her husband was crowned.

There was another woman, almost unnoticed, who came in behind them. Her dress was plainer, though still richly made. She was older than either royal, perhaps near her forties, with a physician’s black band stitched down the sleeves of her dress.

The Kressosi did not permit women to be physicians.

“Commander,” the prince said, seeing Muras and smiling. “I haven’t had the chance to see you since you departed for Jasos. It treated you well, I hope?” He looked at me with a knowing smirk. I kept my eyes down. It had been near a year since I took up with Muras, though I was given to understand that the prince spent most of his time hunting game further south.

Muras rose from his bow. “It did, Your Grace.”

The woman physician watched me with the eyes of a cat assessing whether I might be a threat that needed to be taught a lesson. I kept my posture deferential, but met the woman’s gaze. Was she foreign? Why would a Kressosi prince keep a woman physician? Perhaps she tended to his wife—but then why would she attend a royal event?

“And what’s the lovely creature’s name?” Princess Arabel asked.

I curtsied slightly, in the Kressosi fashion. I found it to be an awkward gesture, but one I had been obliged to perfect. “Lya Sargis, Your Grace.” A nothing name, a name no one had any reason to pay attention to.

Prince Andon looked to the woman physician, and when she spoke, I was startled by the Sarenn burr to her accent. “A common suname, Your Grace. One of the middle south.” Her eyes met mine.

It was impossible to place her accent when she spoke in Kressosi, so I spoke to her in Sarenn. “I did not expect to meet another of my own folk here. May the sun shine on your head.”

The woman’s mouth twisted into an amused smile. “And may your family flourish,Miss Sargis.”

Southeastern, then, a woman of the mountain passes that joined Saren to Aziran trade routes. Perhaps that was how she had come to be a physician.

“Lady Tyna is my adviser in all things Sarenn,” Prince Andon said, more to me than to Muras. “Since the war, her counsel has been… invaluable.”

Tyna was a name I knew. They had been a powerful family in the east, once, but war with Kressos had destroyed them when I was still quite young. I had heard that the survivors given up their estates and scattered to the winds, some to Azira, some further east yet. It was rumored one branch had even gone so far as Luon. To find a member of that family advising the Kressosi throne—there were Sarenn who had killed their own kinfolk for less.

“It was a pleasure to meet you, Miss Sargis,” Lady Tyna said, and the group drew away, to give their greetings to others.

I relaxed as they left, and looked back to Muras. “How long has the prince kept a Sarenn adviser?” I asked.

Muras drew me to the edge of the room on the pretense of getting drinks. “Lor Tyna does many things, the least of which is providing counsel.” I was surprised at the venom in his voice.

“Nominally,” he murmured, “she’s a court physician, so that Princess Arabel need not be troubled with a male physician—but she’s Andon’s creature. Spy, extortionist—assassin. Whatever he needs her to be.”

I looked back to the woman, acting as the prince’s shadow. “How do you know all this?” I whispered.

Muras put a drink in my hand, let out a breath. “She’s the reason Alek is dead.”

Alek Emiran, Muras’ cousin, over ten years his elder. He had died very shortly after the war, when it was rumored his popularity among the army and his personal dislike for Prince Andon made him very dangerous. I had heard once, in comments about how a taste for the north must run in the Emiran family, that Alek had kept a Sarenn mistress, just before he died.

Then I remembered what Muras had called her. “Lady Tyna—her name is Lor?”

Muras nodded. “Yes. After that damned river.” 

#

The River Lor forms most of the border between Saren and Kressos. At its beginning, in the roots of the mountains, it is not an especially remarkable river. It runs cold and fast, but a man can fire a musket from one bank and kill a deer on the other.

As it stretches west, though, the Lor grows. It is fed by rivers on both sides, and it runs both deeper and broader, until the River Lor is a lumbering beast several miles wide from shore to shore.

The stories say the mud in the Lor is black because of all the Sarenn and Kressosi blood that has been spilled into its waters. Southern Sarenn children will tell you about the monstrous fish in the river that grow fat on the corpses of soldiers, and their parents will tell you about the Lor Worm, the old serpent god of the river. She slides along the bottom, waiting, until the day she rises to devour everything on the land, and both Kressos and Saren will be no more.

#

The Kressosi have a dull taste in flowers. Every flower garden in Kressos is overflowing with the same pale pink roses, no bigger around than the circle one makes with their thumb and forefinger, with the same cloying scent.

I spent a lot of time in gardens like these, when important men pulled Muras aside for private conversations which mistresses were not welcome to. The gardens allowed me to avoid conversation.

Most of the time.

_“You must be quite the woman, to have snared Commander Emiran.”_

I did not raise my eyes from the roses. _“You must be quite the woman, to be so trusted by the prince.”_

Lady Tyna chuckled softly. _“I do what I must. As, I imagine, do you.”_ She came to stand at my side, hands clasped in front of her. _“It has been a long time,”_ she said, _“since I was able to freely converse with another Sarenn. Where do you hail from?”_

I looked at her, wary. _“Arborhall.”_ The best lie was no lie at all.

_“Wool country,”_ she said. _“Lord Anarin was among the first to surrender, was he not?”_

I had learned to hide the sting of that memory well. _“Yes. I was not there, at the time.”_

_“I was far from home as well,”_ Lady Tyna said. _“I was in Azira. News of the war had not yet reached us.”_ Her eyes settled on me, calculating. _“The fates are strange to have brought us here, don’t you think?”_

I brushed my fingertips across the dark leaves of the rose. _“That is one word.”_

_“You would not call it strange?”_

_“I would not call it fate.”_ Fate would mean it hadn’t been my fault.

“Hmm.” Lady Tyna turned slightly, gave me a flirtatious smile. _“Will you walk with me, Miss Sargis?”_

_“Do I have a choice?”_

Lady Tyna laughed. _“Of course you do. If you did not, I would not have asked.”_ She walked off, and after a moment, I followed her.

The air was cool enough to make my skin prickle. That wouldn’t last long—Kressosi summers were suffocatingly hot. Lady Tyna walked with a sure stride. She seemed to know this garden well. _“I was able to convince Princess Arabel to diversify her garden a little.”_ She stopped, and plucked a flower from a low, thin plant. Six pointed white petals, a deep red center. Lady Tyna presented it to me, with a small smile.

_“A dawnstar,”_ I said, surprised. They were seldom grown south of the River Lor. Kressosi thought they were weeds. Sarenn planted them on burial mounds, to light the path to the underland. An odd choice for a rose garden.

An odd choice for a gift. I took a step back, keeping my eyes on Lady Tyna. She seemed surprised, but then— _“Ah. Of course.”_ She smiled and glanced away. _“Commander Emiran would warn his mistress about me. I apologize if the gift was misinterpreted.”_

_“What do you want?”_ I asked.

_“Nothing, although I don’t expect you’ll believe that.”_ She shrugged, turned back toward the hall. _“I think our walk is at an end. Doubtless, the commander will be looking for you, soon.”_

_“Is it true that you killed Alek Emiran?”_

Lady Tyna paused, and looked at me. _“Is that what he told you?”_

_“Not in so many words,”_ I said.

_“What is the dead first cousin of your man to you?”_ Lady Tyna asked. _“He died years before you even met Commander Emiran.”_

I said nothing, and that seemed to draw her interest. _“I had heard that I was not his first Sarenn mistress,”_ Lady Tyna said, thoughtful. _“Though I was his last, according to the stories.”_ She looked at me. _“You know that Alek was injured in a riot?”_

I nodded. The king may have been dead, but that was not enough to break Saren. They had sought to avenge their king, and all their dead.

_“His own surgeons tended to him, but infection set in. Who better to treat such a well-respected officer than the prince’s Aziran-trained physician?”_ Lady Tyna plucked a rose from the bushes, running the pad of her thumb lightly over the tip of a thorn. _“No one would look for further answers if a woman could not keep him alive, especially if it proved to be a particularly prolonged and difficult infection. Of course, everything else is only rumor.”_ She pressed her thumb to the thorn, and a spot of blood welled up when she pulled it away. She put the thumb to her mouth.

“Lya.”

I looked up, and saw Muras. He stood just outside the doors, the lantern light casting a golden glow around his silhouette.

“Apologies for keeping you, Miss Sargis,” Lady Tyna said smoothly. “I must return to His Grace.” She nodded slightly to Muras, with a smirk. “Commander.”

Muras inclined his head. “My Lady.” He waited until she had passed, and looked to me again. “Are you alright?”

I looked at the dawnstar in my hand, and dropped it to the ground. “Yes,” I said, looking up. “I’m fine.”

Muras took my hand, looking carefully at me.

“Muras,” I said, “I’m perfectly alright. What did the prince want to talk about?”

He grimaced, and let out a breath. “Let’s go,” he said, “I’ll tell you in the carriage.”

“Muras?”

“Please, Lya.” He squeezed my hand. “There is nothing left for me to do here.” 

#

I disliked carriages. In Saren, I would have ridden, but it was seen as an improper activity for women in Kressos. Their physicians said some nonsense about it harming the woman’s reproductive organs, and when I bluntly asked one man how it was that his organs were not much more vulnerable than my own, he recommended I find another physician to deal with my questions.

I think Muras would have preferred to ride as well, but there were only so many boundaries he was willing to push, and I represented several.

Muras seemed ill at ease, and that made me anxious. I had not seen him like this since his father arrived unannounced one day, and discovered me. “Ah, you’ve finally found a woman, then!” he had said when he first saw me. “Tell me, my dear, what is your name?”

The welcome in his face vanished when he heard my accent, and so did any pleasure he had in my presence. For the rest of his stay, Muras’ father said not one word to me, though he had plenty to say to Muras about me.

My presence was an indiscretion that might have been tolerated in a third or fourth son, not a man’s sole heir. Muras would not be swayed, however, so his father left, and I remained.

“Muras, what’s wrong?”

He drug his hand down the lower half of his face, and let out a breath. “His Grace wants me to return to Morhall.”

I felt cold. Morhall was—had been—the seat of the Sarenn throne. It was the place where, seven years before, Alek and Muras Emiran had led a starving troop in a last desperate attempt to take the castle, and end the war. The place where the king of Saren had been shot, and his head packed in salt and sent to the Kressosi king as proof.

“Why?” I asked. “For how long?”

Muras put a hand on my knee. “There is trouble in the north. Some… wolf cult or some such. He says he wants me to assume command there. For however long it is necessary.” He was staring straight ahead.

“No,” I whispered.

Muras looked at me. “What?”

“Tell him no,” I pleaded. “Someone else can go, but not you.”

“I can’t say no to the crown prince.”

“There must be some kind of family consideration,” I said, “your father—”

“Is in perfect health, as the prince made a point of mentioning.” Muras took my hand, squeezed it. “I have no choice. I’m expected to leave by the beginning of summer.”

I couldn’t go back to Morhall. I would not set foot in that place again, not after everything I had done to escape it.

Muras paused, and looked at me very gravely. “I understand, if you do not want to go. That place… I know what it symbolizes to you.”

I stared at him. He didn’t have even half of an idea what that place meant to me. “What would I do, all alone here?” I asked, quiet.

He looked as though the answer pained him. “You could return to Kaspar. I know he would accept you at any—”

I slapped him.

Muras looked at me in such surprise, I wished I hadn’t done it. “I’m sorry,” I said, drawing away. “I didn’t—don’t speak to me as if I can just go back. Not after what I did.”

Kaspar Heita had been the man I lived with before I met Muras. I had not been his mistress; I did not have command of his house, or any sort of status outside of it. I had begun there as a maid. When he took an interest in me, I instead became something of a secretary, helping him with his business because I showed some skill in bookkeeping.

I had cared for him. With the distance of time, I suppose I can admit that I loved him.

The problem was that I was not his mistress. Though he was estranged from his wife, who still lived with his family and their children in the old family home, he had some principle that to take a mistress would be some shame to his wife, a degradation of her position. He would not divorce her, either, because it was his duty to see that she was supported.

I thought him a coward, but I did not say so.

The breaking point was when I found myself pregnant. Kaspar was delighted, but nothing changed, and I grew to resent him.

I met Muras then. He was a friend of Kaspar’s, they had grown up in similar social circles, though Kaspar was a good ten years older than Muras. I had the sense, then, that they had once been a bit more than friends.

He terrified me, at first—it was not lightly that I greeted the man who had killed my king. It was only gradually that I came to know him as a quiet man, soft-spoken, and considerate of what little he knew of Sarenn customs. I grew comfortable enough to correct him in particulars, and he listened with interest, which made me like him, in spite of myself. It was so rare, to find someone who not only did not mock me for what I was, but sought to understand.

Muras seemed keenly interested in me, though he had the grace to conceal it from Kaspar, and not to say anything to me directly. He was staying in Jasos for near half a year, to tend to something at the military academy there, and I saw him often. Perhaps he sensed my unhappiness, my discontent. Perhaps he realized how pleased I was to have his company and conversation.

My son was born just after midwinter, so small and feisty and howling like a wolf pup. It broke my heart.

I had told Kaspar I would be leaving.

He hadn’t seemed surprised.

He asked me if I would at least let him raise our son.

Muras had told me, in one of the few moments that we spoke privately and directly, that he would not mind my bringing the child along—but I couldn’t do that. I couldn’t bring my boy into another man’s house, knowing how he would be regarded by everyone who knew he was not Muras’ child. So I left him with Kaspar, named him after his father. Better, I thought, that the only traces of me be in his blood. I kissed him goodbye, sang him the only lullaby I would ever sing to him, and gave my son over to a wetnurse, and resolved not to look back, so I would not lose my nerve.

I could not go back to Kaspar Heita’s house.

“I only thought—” Muras reconsidered his words. “He still cares for you. I do not believe he begrudges you anything.”

“I made my choice,” I said. “I won’t go back.” If I saw my son again, I wouldn’t be able to leave him, and that would only hurt everyone.

Muras was quiet for a moment. “I would value your counsel,” he said, “if you came with me.”

“More than just my counsel, I hope,” I said.

Muras smiled. “Your company, too, of course.”

I put my head on his shoulder and leaned into his side. To follow him, of all people, back to Morhall… the woman I was seven years earlier would have cut my throat for that. 

#

A man of means in Saren may keep several wives, if he can support them. The marriages must be approved by the courts, with testimony from the families of both the groom and the potential bride, to prevent neglect. Each wife must have her own domain, her own domestic sovereignty.

No man in Saren may have more wives than the king.

I was seventeen, when I was sold to Corasin.

He saw me at a midsummer feast, when he came south to marry one of his daughters to Lord Haldur. He approached my father, offered him lands to the west of us that would ensure Anarin wool had priority access to the coast, and three ships in harbor there. My father couldn’t refuse.

So Liana Anarin was to become the thirteenth wife of His Majesty King Corasin II of Saren.

My mother could not have been prouder. She braided ribbons of Luon silk into my hair, drew the kohl around my eyes with care. My father bought me a fine cow elk to ride, a beautiful creature a pale gold color, with a saddle stitched with scarlet thread. My two youngest brothers, Corvin and Tatton, pestered me constantly about Morhall and what treasures it might hold, as if I knew anything more about it than they did.

Of all my family, only my brother Julas seemed perturbed.

He was sixteen then, less than a year between us. Most mistook us for twins. “You’ll write, won’t you?” he asked.

“Once a week,” I promised him. I was anxious, but trying to hide it. “I’ll be a princess,” I said, trying to pretend the thought didn’t frighten me. Julas would be Lord Anarin someday, he didn’t need to be worrying about me. I would be well cared for in Morhall, I wouldn’t want for anything.

“I’ll name one of my sons after you,” I told Julas, thinking it would please him.

“If you were marrying Lord Cader you wouldn’t have to go so far away,” Julas muttered.

“Lord Cader is approximately a thousand years old and reeks of onions,” I replied. I could hear our mother coming down the hall. “Will you do one thing for me?” I asked him.

“What?” he asked.

“When you’re at my wedding,” I said, “just don’t look as if it’s my funeral.”


	2. In the Snow

I woke half-crushed under Todd’s weight, overheated, and with my bladder near bursting. It hadn’t taken me long after I joined Muras and Todd’s household and bed to learn that the fastest way to extricate myself from Todd’s sleeping arms was to shift around until I could put a sharp elbow in his ribs.

Todd woke with a cough and a grunt and rolled off of me, rubbing his ribs. He mumbled something that sounded vaguely like ‘sorry’ and turned over, putting his arm over Muras, so that in half an hour Muras could throw him off in pursuit of the same chamber I was on my way to.

I had a headache, and sitting on the seat over the chamber pot I rubbed at my temples, I noticed the smear of red on the inside of my thigh that signaled I was about to spend the next few days in utter misery unless I sent someone to the apothecary.

I spent a little time cleaning up by lamplight, and reemerged to find my nightdress thrown over a chair. I could at least send a maid for what I needed, and then spend the rest of the day feeling sorry for myself.

Todd was awake enough to catch the hem of my nightdress as I passed the bed. “Come back to bed,” he mumbled.

I bent, tugging on his ear. “I’ll bleed on the sheets.”

“The laundrywoman can take care of it,” Todd said, grinning sleepily.

“You’re not even awake,” I said. “I have to send the maid for my tea. I’ll come back after.”

The house was always cool in the mornings, enough to make my skin prickle. I had grown used to its quiet, the creaking boards and austere walls. I had thought that perhaps I might be able to find some small tapestry to hang, or perhaps I could embroider something that reminded me of Saren—but if we were going to Morhall, it didn’t seem that would be necessary.

The maid sent on her mission, I took a cup of lavender tea and went upstairs again. The bed was empty of Muras, and Todd laid on his back, rubbing his face. I sat on the bed and felt his hand on my hip.

“Are you going to be alright?” he asked. I knew he didn’t mean my cycle.

I sipped at my tea and looked at the silver morning light peeking around the curtains. “I’ll do what I have to.” I had done what I had to since I was married, done whatever was required to stay alive. Morhall had not broken me before.

It would not break me now.

I put my tea aside and stretched out next to Todd, letting him pull me close. He kissed my forehead and brushed my hair out of my face. He looked softest in the mornings, when he wasn’t yet alert enough to look and act like a mischievous boy. Todd had the kind of face and personality that charmed women from sixteen to sixty, playful and flirtatious. Whatever affection he held for me, whatever flirtations he gave anyone, his heart belonged to Muras, and no one else—which was why I liked him so much. There was no risk of too much attachment.

“If he’d just retire we wouldn’t have to bother with any of this,” Todd muttered. “Could move back to Pardas and grow soft and fat running a winery.”

I laughed a little. Muras would never be able to content himself with vineyards and wine barrels. He needed to feel that what he was doing mattered to king and country.

I put my forehead to Todd’s chest, sighed. “I haven’t seen Saren since the war.”

Todd stroked my hair. “What scares you most?”

I thought, tracing my fingers over his ribs. “That the Saren I remember doesn’t exist, and won’t ever exist again.”

I heard the door shut and shifted to look over Todd’s shoulder. Muras scrubbed his face with one hand and looked at us both. A soft smile pulled across his face, and he went to the wardrobe for his clothes. Todd shifted onto his back, his arm still around my shoulders. “What’re you in such a hurry to get up for?”

“You’d spend your whole life in bed if I didn’t make you get up,” Muras returned. “Are you getting ready to run off with my mistress?”

I put my chin on Todd’s chest. “We were just discussing retiring to Pardas to grow old and fat while swimming in wine.”

“Were you now?” Muras pulled an undershirt over his shoulders. “I wish you well, then.”

“Muras,” Todd said, in a pitch perfect impression of a whining child, “come back to bed.”

“I have a meeting with Major Calash.” Muras ran his fingers through his hair, looking in the wardrobe for his shirt.

“Commanders are allowed to be late,” I said. “Especially ones with your reputation.” I had met Major Calash, and I disliked him. He held command of a Kressosi fort just across the River Lor, and spoke freely about how much he disdained the primitive Sarenn and their superstitions. On the occasion that I was present, he treated me with all the regard one might give a piece of furniture.

Muras laughed softly, and began to pull on his uniform. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

I felt the twinge below my navel that signaled I would be in misery by the time the maid returned. “You won’t be gone long, will you?” I asked. Todd was a poor nurse, too convinced that a joke would be enough to lift my spirits when what I really needed was a hot bath and someone to stroke my hair and speak soothingly, which Muras did with attentiveness.

“No,” he said, buttoning his jacket. “Only a few hours.” He stepped to the bed, bending to kiss Todd’s cheek, and then mine. “You can both bear without me that long, I think.”

I let my eyes fall away and did not tell him about the anxieties that plagued me whenever he was too long out of my sight, how I could not sleep on the nights that kept him out until well after dark. I did not fool myself into thinking it was because of my feelings for Muras—it was the terror of what losing him might mean, how I might be set adrift in the world once more. It wasn’t rational, it wasn’t even reasonable—but in my blood I knew that in Morhall, my anxieties would only be worsened, because in Saren there were a great many more things that might take Muras from me than there were in Kressos.

#

It was Julas who gave me the name Lya. He taught it Corvin and Tatton when they were just learning to talk, because it was easier to say than Liana. They all called me that, my brothers, and so often that even our mother began to refer to me by that name.

Only our father never called me Lya. My name, see, comes from the first of our family line. Anarin, we call ourselves. The descendants of Anar.

Anar was born to the woman Liane, on the same night that his father’s prize bitch birthed two black pups. The lord’s hounds were all red, and it was a trait that he cultivated to set his hounds apart, as he bred them to be the fiercest, fastest hounds that might be found in all of Saren. He meant to destroy the pups, as he assumed that someone else’s hound had interbred with his pack, but Liane stopped him. The pups had been born within an hour of their own son. They were meant to be Anar’s hounds.

As a boy, Anar named his pups _Iarantan_ , Irontooth, and _Svartkla_ , Blackclaw. Always they were at Anar’s side, and as they grew, it became evident that Iarantan and Svartkla were no mere hounds. They grew too big, too wild. They howled like wolves.

Anar, too, grew into a giant of a man, towering above even the tallest men in his father’s hall. He was a great hunter, and a greater warrior. The stories say that his hounds fought alongside him, and it could not be said whether they howled for blood, or Anar did.

There are many stories about Anar. About his mother, Liane, there are only two: that of the night Anar was born, and the night Anar died.

Anar became a wealthy man, as heroes in the old stories often do after performing great feats, and he became soft, and complacent. He boasted of his past deeds, but performed no new ones, and he neglected Iarantan and Svartkla. One night after a great feast, which Anar had spent boasting of his feats in battle, neglecting to mention the role his wolf-hounds had played, Anar went to bed drunk, and Iarantan and Svartkla tore him limb from limb, and ate his heart.

It was Liane who discovered them, and Liane who avenged her son. She took Anar’s sword and slew the wolf-hounds. She drained their blood, and gave it to Anar’s two sons to drink. She cut out their hearts, and cooked them for her grandsons to eat. She skinned them, and tanned their hides, and from them made cloaks for Anar’s sons to wear. The sons took the names of their father’s murderous hounds, Iarantan and Svartkla Anarsson, and in time, we the descendants of Anar became Anarin.

It is not just Anar’s blood we have in our veins, father told me, but that of the wolf-hounds, who to this day adorn the Anarin banner: two black hounds on a field of red. We called ourselves Anarins.

We might as justly have called ourselves Vulgasons.

#

The end of spring brought us to Nolsaford, a port city on the River Lor. When I had known Nolsaford, it had been small, hardly more than a fishing town, but now it boasted half a dozen ferry lines across this calm point in the river, and the town had crawled halfway up the hillside, to the Kressosi fort which now overlooked the top.

“Almost makes you miss the fort days, doesn’t it?” Todd asked, winking at Muras.

Muras scoffed, and shook his head. “It’ll be a warm midwinter day in Saren before I miss the fort,” he replied.

We had taken a rivership, a slim, shallow-bellied vessel that the Kressosi favored for inland travel. It had been close quarters, musty smelling and entirely uncomfortable. I was eager to be rid of the ship, if not so enthusiastic about setting foot once more on the Saren side of the Lor.

I took stock of the goods being shipped as we made our way into the town. Bound to leave Saren for far-flung ports were mostly things I recognized: ivory, horns, and hides from creatures like mammoth, woolly rhino, bison, walrus; timber of pine, fir, and cedar which gave off a welcome scent among the general stink of wood smoke and fish; sheep’s wool that was stuffed in bags near bursting; furs from rabbits, weasels, foxes, otters, seals, bears both white and brown, snow lions, and… wolves.

My gaze caught on one wolf pelt in particular, as white as fresh-fallen snow, and perhaps a little larger than the average pelt. I reached out my hand as if to touch it, only just catching myself. What was a fur like that doing here?

The fur trader had caught me staring. Taking me for Kressosi, that was the language he announced himself in. “Taken with it, Madam? Fine pelt, this, slain by a Horta Hasi warrior—”

_“The Horta Hasi are not a warrior people,”_ I said coldly. _“And if a man among them were to kill a wolf in self-defense, he would keep the pelt for himself to commemorate his victory.”_

The fur trader turned several shades of red, and bowed slightly. _“My apologies, Madam. I did not realize—”_

“How much for the pelt?” Muras interrupted, having noticed our exchange, and missed my newfound disdain for the man.

The fur trader glanced at me, trying to gauge how successful he might be at swindling us. “An ounce of silver.”

“A quarter of an ounce,” I countered, before Muras could be fool enough to agree to that price. Kressosi are piss-poor bargainers, particularly when they have money.

“Three-quarters,” The fur trader returned. “And that’s a criminally low price for a pelt as fine as this one, as any woman such as yourself ought to know.”

“A half, and I’ll take an otter pelt with it,” I said, and added in Sarenn, _“or I tell the Vulgason that you are a cheat and a swindler.”_

The fur trader looked sharply at Muras, at his commanders’ uniform, as if trying to decide whether or not he believed me that this, really, was the Vulgason. Perhaps the threat of being accused of cheating a Kressosi commander was enough, because he relented. “Half an ounce,” he agreed, “and a fox pelt.”

“That grey one,” I said, pointing to a promising looking fox fur displayed on his heap.

“Done,” the fur trader said, eager to be paid and rid of me.

I was pleased that my skills hadn’t been weakened by my years in Kressos, and draped the fox fur around Muras’ shoulders as we left. “For that delicate Kressosi constitution,” I teased.

He laughed softly, touching the fur. “You’re pleased with it, I hope?” He nodded at the wolf pelt.

I held it close to my breast, digging my fingers into the coarse fur. “A white wolf pelt is too important to be sold to just anyone,” I said. “I understand that things have changed since the war, but…” White wolf pelts were nearly sacred. In most of Saren, the wolves were grey or black. It was only in the far north that one found the white wolves, and even then, one had to be a very skillful hunter indeed to track them and kill one. How could a trader even think to sell such a pelt to a Kressosi, or any foreigner?

Muras put a hand on my shoulder, steering me to a waiting cart. “Let’s get ourselves to the fort and get warmed up.”

I looked up, and felt comforted to see the rhinos. Horses were rarely a favored beast on this side of the Lor, and I had missed the low grunts and steady plod of cart rhinos. They were smaller than their wild cousins, and much more docile. Herdsmen painted the horns of their woollu rhinos with distinct patterns to distinguish them from other herds, and when a rhino died or was slaughtered, the paint was gently scraped away, and the ivory sold. These rhinos were painted with swirls of yellow and blue, bright against their dull brown hair.

“I wanted to ask you,” Muras said, settling into the seat of the cart beside me, “if you would take command of our preparations to go north.”

“Everything is command, with you,” I said, laughing. “How do you mean?”

“I thought that you would have the most knowledge as to what we might need,” Muras said, looking around at the town as the cart pulled through the mud. “And… I thought it might give you time to see things for yourself.”

I looked down at the pelt in my lap. So much had changed. “First things first,” I said, “I find a reliable elk breeder—and then I get some proper riding skirts.”

“Right, elk,” Muras said, grimacing.

“Horses are too fragile for the journey, you know that.”

“Yes, you’ve made it known many times.” He gave a light tug to my braid, and smiled. “I’ll trust you to find a beast that won’t kill me.” 

#

They gave Muras the name _Vulgason_ after Morhall was taken. For the brutality of the taking, I’m told, and a touch of the belief that no one could have bested that winter but the Wolf’s own son.

Corasin was shot through the heart, three times, by the man then called Major Muras Emiran, who hacked off his head and carried it through the palace to show all there that the king was dead. He carried Corasin’s head by the braid, for Sarenn men keep their hair long, as the Kressosi do not. He threw it at the feet of Corasin’s first wife, and asked her where the children were.

So goes the story as it is told by those who were not there.

Muras does not like to speak of it much, but this, he does deny, and ferociously so. He killed Corasin, and did take his head off then, that much is true. The rest, he says, was Alek—for it was under his cousin Alek’s command that Morhall was taken, and it was under Alek’s command that Corasin’s children, and twelve of his wives, were slain.

Of the thirteenth wife, of Liana Anarin, all that Muras knows is that she attempted to flee the castle, and was lost in the snow. Frozen dead, it is assumed, or perhaps fallen prey to wolves or snow lions. He says he never laid eyes on her, but she haunted his dreams, a frozen blue face, icy fingers that wrapped around his heart.

I laid my hand over his heart when he told me. “She’ll haunt you no more,” I said. He tells me the dreams ceased, after that. 

#

_“I’ve some fine geldings, Miss, if that’s what you’re looking for.”_ The elkherd beckoned me to the high fence of a corral, gesturing a group of antler-less geldings and cows not deemed suitable for breeding. Some were quite young, not big enough to endure a journey to Morhall with grown men on their backs, as I told the man. I needed fully grown animals, still young, and even tempered because the men I was traveling with were more accustomed to horses.

He chuckled. _“You’ve a keen eye, Miss. Should I just let you look, then?”_

_“I would appreciate it, sir.”_

The elkherd walked with me through the corrals, telling me a little about any he saw me pausing at, their lineage and temperament. I selected two fully grown geldings with mild tempers for Muras and Todd, and was left to look for one for myself. The elkherd seemed to grow puzzled as nothing pleased me. I paced from circle to circle, not certain myself what I was looking for, until I laid eyes on him.

A young bull, by himself, trotting restlessly in his pen, bugling as if to raise the gods. I put my hands on the fence, and smiled.

_“Oh, not him, Miss,”_ the elkherd said. _“I’ve a mind to shoot that one, as much trouble as he is—never had a more wild beast come out of my herd. Shame, both his sire and his dam are out of good lines.”_

As if to demonstrate, the bull spied the young man with the unfortunate task of bringing him hay, and charged the fence at a gallop. The boy threw the hay over and stumbled back as quickly as he could. The bull paced along that section of fence, snorting and shaking his head.

I whistled, long and low, and the bull set his eyes on me. He pranced a bit, stopped to watch me.

I whistled again, and he flicked his ears, curious. I walked slowly round the ring, and the bull watched me all the way, snorting softly. Before the elkherd could stop me, I slipped between the poles of the fence, and was inside with the bull.

_“Miss!”_ the elkherd cried in alarm. _“Miss, please get out, before—”_

The bull judged me warily, pacing.

I held my hand up, and whistled softly.

Cautiously, the bull approached, and stood just short of my hand. He sniffed the air, taking up my scent, and after a moment, he stepped forward, and allowed me to touch him.

_“By the ice,”_ the elkherd whispered.

_“I’ll take this one, sir,”_ I said, and he did not argue with me.

I had missed the freedom of riding skirts, sitting astride in the saddle. Once I had persuaded my young bull to permit me to put a saddle on him, and then to ride—both of which took some time—I led the two geldings back to the fort, and the view of Nolsaford was much improved, framed by the velvet of my bull’s growing antlers. He would look kingly in the fall, when the velvet was shed.

He trotted through the gates of the fort while shaking his head against the reins, though he yielded when I gave a warning tug.

I heard Todd’s laugh before I saw him. “Of course,” he said, standing on the stoop of a barracks with his hands on his hips. “You would pick the biggest beast for yourself.” He shook his head, and smiled at me. “You look like some kind of wild raider queen.”

I put my hand on my hip, and stuck my tongue out at him. “Where’s Muras?” I asked.

“Oh, deep in conversation with Senior Lieutenant Coren, I’m sure. I left when they started talking about politics.” Todd tried to approach me, and my bull snorted and swung his head, and Todd took a rapid step back.

“Don’t worry,” I said, swinging out of the saddle. “Yours won’t have half the temper of this one.” I caught the reins, and pulled the bull’s head away before he could try to bite me. He made a low grumble, shifting on his hooves impatiently. “I saved this one’s life. He’ll learn to be grateful for it.”

“This from the woman who’s afraid of horses.”

“I don’t like horses, I never said I was afraid of them.” I patted my bull on the shoulder, and looking over his back, I spied someone I hadn’t expected to see in a military fort. She was Sarenn, by her dress, and heavily pregnant. Her pale blond braid hung over her shoulder as she caught the hand of a girl too old to be her own, scolding her fiercely for running off.

“That’ll be the senior lieutenant’s new wife,” Todd said, following my gaze. “He had a Kressosi wife before he was posted here, but she had no interest in leaving behind her social circles for Saren, so she stayed behind. Took a fever and died about a year ago.”

“When did he remarry?” I asked. Kressosi were expected to mourn a spouse for a full year before taking a new spouse, but the woman I saw would have become pregnant no more than a season after her husband had become a widower. And she was so young…

“Oh, he waited the proper time. She was his mistress, before.” Todd shrugged his shoulders. “Brought all his children up north when his wife died, I think she’s been caring for them ever since. Doesn’t speak a word of Kressosi, but the children are picking up Sarenn fast enough to make up for it.”

I wondered if Senior Lieutenant Coren spoke any Sarenn.

“You should talk to her,” Todd said, “I think she’s lonely, but if I spent too much effort trying to befriend her, it might cause problems with her husband.”

I nodded. “I’ll take these to the stables,” I said. “Will you tell Muras I need money to buy you both the proper gear?”

Todd said he would, and I made my way to the stables, keeping a tight grip on the reins. “Hush, now,” I said, when the bull shook his head, and resentfully, he allowed me to walk him and the two geldings inside.

A young soldier who meant to be helpful attempted to take the reins from me, and when the bull bit his arm, I told him he could handle the geldings, and I would manage my own beast.

His pride more seriously wounded than his arm, he left me be, and I led the bull into a high-walled stall where he would not be able to reach any other elk.

He spent half an hour dancing around me before he allowed me to remove the saddle and halter, and I was ever mindful of when he looked like he might kick or bite.

“Hmm,” I said, hanging the gear on the wall. “I ought to call you Bili, for your temper.”

“What’s Bili?”

I looked to find a boy of about twelve hanging from the door of the stall, and he leapt down when the bull charged, snorting and striking his hooves against the door.

“Easy, easy,” I said, coaxing my infuriated bull away from the door with a handful of sweet oats. I made sure the door was well-latched when I stepped out, and looked around to find the boy sitting on a pile of straw, looking suitably wary. “Hello,” I said. “What’s your name?”

The boy stood up, brushing straw from his trousers. “Tiran, Miss,” he said, nodding his head respectfully. “Senior Lieutenant Coren’s my father. You’re Commander Emiran’s woman.”

I cocked my head to the side. “I suppose I am. You may call me Miss Sargis, though.”

“Sorry, Miss,” Tiran said, and looked at me with curiosity. “What’s Bili?”

“Have you seen a Sarenn forge?” I asked.

Tiran nodded.

I gestured him to follow me so that we could get out of the way of the soldiers tending to the stable. “Then you’ve seen the figure carved above every forge.”

“The man and the cattle bull,” Tiran said.

“The woman and the cattle bull,” I corrected. “The goddess Thraldi was born from the heartstone of a mountain struck by lightning, and tamed fire so that folk might make use of it. She travels on the back of her great golden bull, Bili, who she shaped from the summer wildfire.”

“They don’t worship Thraldi in Kressos,” Tiran said.

“You are not in Kressos,” I pointed out. I was amused by the boy, but I had a question for him as well. “Your stepmother is Sarenn, yes?”

Tiran nodded. “She says to call her _ima_.” It was the word for mother.

“Will you take me to meet your ima?” I asked. “You can introduce us.”

Tiran showed me through the fort, to the modest house that he informed me was his home, where he lived with his father and stepmother and all his brothers and sisters. “Ima!” he called as he brought me through the door, and in clumsy Sarenn, _“A woman here to see you!”_ His pronunciation was good, if his grammar still needed work.

The young woman appeared from what I guessed to be her kitchen, flour on the apron that hung perilously over her swollen middle, and I inclined my head to her. _“Mistress Coren,”_ I said, _“May the sun shine on your head. My name is Lya Sargis.”_

The woman blinked in surprise, and then she smiled, whipping off her apron and reaching her hands out to me, grasping my fingers. _“May your family prosper,”_ she said, _“please, call me Branhild. It’s been so damned long since I could speak to one of my own.”_

I laughed, and squeezed her hands. _“I will call you Branhild if you call me Lya.”_

#

Branhild was nineteen, she told me, pouring me a cup of hot cider as we sat in her kitchen. Her father had been killed by Kressosi soldiers when she was eight, and she had left her rural village for Nolsaford to live with her uncle, so that her mother would not have to feed her. Her uncle’s wife put her to work dyeing thread and fabric, and when she was eleven, the war began.

When the Kressosi came across the river in Nolsaford, she and her aunt had taken all the food they could carry and hid in the hills for weeks. They came back when there were fewer soldiers, which was when they learned that Branhild’s uncle had been killed.

She and her aunt made enough money to get by after the war, but it was hard, and they often went hungry, so when the fort was finished and a new commanding officer took a shine to the sixteen-year-old girl charged with making the dye for new Kressosi uniforms, Branhild leapt at the chance for a more comfortable life. _“My aunt has a new apprentice now,”_ she said, _“and my husband sends her enough money that she can make do even when prices are bad.”_

Branhild’s smile had a faint sorrow to it. _“I don’t see her much, anymore.”_

_“Why not?”_ I asked.

_“It’s not safe for me to go into town,”_ Branhild said. _“Because they think I’m a traitor and a whore.”_

_“I’m sorry,”_ I said.

Branhild waved a dismissive hand. _“They can think what they like. I’m better off now. You haven’t had any trouble?”_

_“No,”_ I said, _“but I think that’s because no one knows who I am or why I’m here.”_

Branhild nodded. _“Best not tell them.”_

She had gained five children, since the death of Coren’s first wife. She managed well enough, she said, though I didn’t miss the tired half moons under her eyes. _“Will the baby be your first?”_ I asked.

Branhild shook her head. _“There was one other, but… he died.”_ She shrugged her shoulders, in the way of women who have already endured much hardship, and chosen to put it behind them. _“This one, I hope, will do better.”_

_“I will pray that it’s so,”_ I said, and that made her smile.

_“Do you have any children?”_ she asked.

It took me a moment, to summon the ability to smile. _“Yes,”_ I said softly. _“Two sons. But I had to give them up.”_

Branhild grasped my hand, and gave me a sympathetic smile. _“I’m sorry.”_

#

For a few days, I was content to spend time in the fort, taking to the saddle once more and persuading Bili that he would greatly benefit from not attempting to trample every person who wasn’t myself. The soldiers talked about me, though not where I could hear. It was Todd, who recounted with great amusement that I had been declared a mad Sarenn witch, to have any mastery over such a wild creature.

“I thought Kressosi didn’t believe in witchcraft,” I said.

“Of course not,” Todd agreed, “but they’re not stupid enough to be unafraid of it.”

I visited Branhild in the afternoons, and asked her questions. Only once did I grow brave enough to say that I had relations in Arborhall, and wonder how they were doing. She told me that Julas was Lord Anarin, now. He had a Kressosi wife, she heard from the rumors (port cities are always full of gossip) but that was all she knew.

There was Tiran, too, who had taken to shadowing me wherever I went. I spoke to him only in Sarenn, and gently corrected his grammar where I could. _“You have the chance to understand Saren better than any other Kressosi,”_ I told him. _“Don’t waste it.”_

He was a very serious child. It was three days before he came to me, and told me his father wanted to meet me.

I had not met Tomtes Coren directly. I supposed it was not a priority for officers to meet each other’s mistresses, but it was curious to me that he went through his son, rather than Muras.

I understood better when Tiran brought me to his father, and Coren spied me and said, “Ah, so you’re the woman my son’s fallen so in love with.”

Tiran went red-faced and protested, but his father only laughed and clapped him on the shoulder, telling him to go help his stepmother. Coren waited until his son was gone, and looked at me again, in a way that I thought was meant to be friendly. “I understand you’ve befriended my wife.”

I gazed back at him. “I know how lonely it can be,” I said, “to be companion to a Kressosi man.”

That was not the answer he had expected. I sat at a chair in front of his desk, since he had not asked me to sit. “You should consider yourself blessed to have such a curious son,” I said. “Tiran will excel at whatever he chooses to pursue.”

“Yes, he’s quite enchanted with you,” Coren said. “Tells me you named your elk after some sort of… magic bull.”

I smiled thinly. “That’s one thing to call it, I suppose.”

He looked at me much more shrewdly than I had anticipated from a man of his age who had not advanced to a higher rank than ‘senior lieutenant.’ “You seem like a cunning woman, Miss Sargis,” he said. “What are your thoughts on your man’s new post?”

I wasn’t sure what he was getting at. Men did not usually discuss this sort of thing with women like me. “Prince Andon himself asked him to come.”

“Have you asked yourself why?” Coren poured himself a drink, and made a gesture to offer me one, which I declined. Were he Sarenn, I might have accepted, but this was a test. Kressosi men did not drink alone with women with whom they were not involved. “Why send such an honored man all the way out to Morhall?” he asked. “Godforsaken frigid hellhole that it is.”

I had pondered that, and none of the possible conclusions I had found made me feel at ease. Alek had been honored, too. “All due respect, Senior Lieutenant, but how is it any concern of yours?” I asked.

Coren smiled, shrugged. “Maybe you’re right. I’m comfortable where I am. This is as soft a post as one can get, with the forts. I’ve my wife, my children—and I’m not so popular as to draw attention to myself. It should be of concern to you, though.” He raised his glass to me, leaning against his desk. “Your man is popular. Very popular. And now the Heir Apparent personally asks him to get as far away from Kressos as he can? Gives one pause.”

“And what would you suggest I do?”

“Run,” he said simply. “While you still can. It’s what I’d tell my wife to do, if I were suddenly asked by the prince himself to go to Morhall.”

“I’ll take that into consideration,” I replied frostily. “If that’s all then, Senior Lieutenant—”

He held up a hand. “Of course, don’t let me keep you. And if you see my son, Miss Sargis—I’d thank you to stop telling him Sarenn fairy stories.” 

#

I don’t need anyone to tell me how Corasin died.

I was in the room when Muras Emiran killed him.

The only kindness my husband ever did me was to show me where to hide in his chambers, a passage that would take me to the outer walls of the castle. I don’t know if he truly expected me to survive the taking of Morhall, if he thought I was mad enough to make an attempt to escape, or if he simply didn’t want to witness whatever the Kressosi would do when they found me.

What I remember of the first time I laid eyes on Muras Emiran was the splash of blood across his face. His cheeks were flushed, from the cold outside, from whatever blood lust had taken hold of him, I didn’t know.

None of the stories will tell you about the moment of silence between them—the king staring down the young officer who had come to kill him. It felt like centuries to me, watching from the dark. I saw the fear in Corasin’s face, and I saw too how he refused to cower. He must have thought, then, what many Sarenn think when faced with their deaths: when they reached the halls of the dead, they would not allow it to be said that they died a coward.

The first shot struck him just north of the heart, and as Corasin staggered, blood blossomed across his white shirt like the center of a dawnstar flower. The second and third shot, Muras took at a closer range, and the king of Saren’s body thudded to the floor like so much dead meat.

I only fled when I saw the Kressosi officer take the knife from his belt, and drag Corasin’s head up by the hair, and begin to saw.

I was not dressed for the snowstorm I knew awaited me outside. I was in thin red silk, no shoes on my feet, and I knew that to flee Morhall was to die.

It was to die on my own terms. I would not let my family wonder at what horrors I suffered at the hands of Kressosi soldiers.

Plunging out into the snow, fleeing as quickly as I could into the storm, not caring which way I went so long as it took me far away from that place, my tears froze my lashes together, so that I could not see.

It was my fault that this had happened.

Because of me, the king was dead.

Because of me, the children would die.

Because of me, Róana would die.

I tripped, and fell into the snow. I swore I could feel the life draining from me, and I was glad of it. I deserved to die this way: alone, bearing the weight of what I had done, all the blood that was on my hands.

That was when the Wolf found me, and took me away.


	3. Home

Muras lay with his head on my middle, while I combed my fingers through his hair. I wished he would grow it long. It was the same pale color as flax, unusual in a man from the south of Kressos, and I knew it would look beautiful in a Sarenn braid, gleaming in the sun.

“Of course I’ve considered it,” he said quietly. “But you don’t say no to a prince.”

“Do you think it could just be to get you out of the way?” I asked. “Without… harming you?” There was always a chance for that, wasn’t there? To just send him somewhere were he couldn’t cause too much trouble, where he would be kept busy and they wouldn’t have to bother with anything more severe.

“I don’t know.” He closed his eyes, turned his head toward my hand. “I try not to worry about it.” 

I stopped. “Try not to worry about it?” I whispered. “Muras—”

“There’s nothing I can do,” Muras said, “short of turning traitor.” He sighed. “If it is just to get me out of the way, to put me somewhere I can’t cause trouble… then I suppose I’ll learn to call Morhall home.”

I swallowed down the stone in my throat, and returned to stroking his hair. “Where the hell has Todd gotten off to?” I asked, when I found my voice again.

“Drinking and singing with the soldiers, from what he told me. Doesn’t miss the soldiering but he does miss the soldiers.” Muras reached up and caught my hand, wrapping his fingers around mine. “Are you well?”

I hadn’t been well since I was married. “I’m just—thinking of my son.”

“Kip?” That was the nickname Kaspar had given to our boy. He didn’t care for calling a child by his own name. I didn’t care for it at all, but as I wasn’t the one calling him by it, I supposed it didn’t matter.

“Veland.” It had been so easy to tell Muras the story. A frightened young widow, fleeing the war, not knowing at the time that I was pregnant. I was sheltered by the Atsa Hasi, who adopted my son as one of their own when I could not care for him. The only thing I had given him was his name, a perfectly common Sarenn name, nothing that would mark him as special.

None of it was a lie. If I withheld the specifics, that didn’t matter. I had done what I had to keep Veland safe. He need never know what he was.

Muras squeezed my hand. “Any child would be blessed to have you for a mother.”

I laughed softly, looked away. “I’ve given away both my sons. What kind of mother does that make me?”

Muras sat up, and turned round to look at me. “Don’t talk like that,” he said. He looked at me carefully. “Something’s upset you.”

I waved a hand, looked away. “Of course I’m upset, you fool. Everything that’s—it’s just too much.” I shook my head, let Muras pull me into his shoulder. “When do we leave here?” I asked.

“Soon,” he promised me, rubbing my back. “You know I’ll do anything you ask of me, don’t you?”

What an absurd thing to say. I couldn’t help but laugh. “I know. I know.” Let him believe what he wanted, if it made him feel better.

Muras stroked my hair.

_They think I’m a traitor and a whore,_ Branhild had said. I had feared as much, but to hear it was true had put a wound in me. How could they expect a woman to vanguard an entire nation’s honor with her bed, when her bed was the most powerful coin she had to ensure her survival?

Branhild only wanted to escape the struggle she had always known.

I only wanted to protect my sons.

I knew Muras wanted a child. I knew just as surely that his family would never accept any child I bore him, for the curse of my Sarenn blood. Even if the child looked just like him, they would cast doubt over whether or not it was truly Muras’ child—who could truly trust a Sarenn?

After a moment, Muras muttered, “I can’t believe you picked the single wildest elk you could find for yourself.”

I laughed into his nightshirt, and sat back. “Bili is a perfectly gentle creature,” I said. “To me.”

Muras chuckled. “Only because he knows well enough to respect you.” He kissed my forehead. “You ought to sleep.”

“Don’t think you’re getting rid of me that easily, Commander,” I replied, pulling him forward by the front of his shirt. I wanted a distraction, and he was always happy to provide one. 

#

Todd crawled into bed at some godsforsaken hour of the night, not as drunk as the cloud of alcohol in the air around him might have suggested. He sounded like a snuffling dog, burrowing under the covers and waking me up with the cold draft of air. I muttered a curse under my breath and rubbed my face.

“Sorry,” Todd mumbled, flopping against the pillow. “Didn’t mean t’wake you.”

“Shut up and go to sleep,” I muttered, pulling the blanket back up over his shoulders. “You stink like a tavern floor.”

Todd laughed and rolled over so I wouldn’t have to smell his breath. I curled up against his back, because he was always warm, and was asleep again in a moment.

I was aware, when I opened my eyes on a snowy flat, that I was dreaming. I turned all the way about, and saw nothing for miles but white. I couldn’t tell where the ice ended and the sky began. The wind blew cold through my clothes, pulled my hair loose from the braid to whip at my face.

When I came full circle, back to where I had begun, there was a woman before me. She was as pale as the snow and ice, hardly visible except for the dark of her pupils, the bloody red of her eyes. Her hair was short, and bristled from her forehead down her back like wolf hair. She was naked, and her proportions were strange, not quite human.

I didn’t ask who she was.

I knew.

I trembled, and she touched my face. Her fingers were warmer than I expected. Rough and tough as old leather, but warm. Her long thick fingernails scraped my cheek. I couldn’t tell how old she was, but she wasn’t young. She gave me the impression of being as old as the ice itself.

“You’ve come home.” Her lips never moved. Her voice was on the wind, cracking out of the ice itself, somewhere deep in my bones.

“Please,” I said, “I’ll pay my price.”

She nodded. “Yes. You will.” She released my face. “You did not give me your death. You gave me your life.”

“I don’t understand,” I whispered.

She smiled, a smile with too many teeth and gums that were too red. “You will.”

I woke gasping for breath and chilled. I sat up, gulping down lungfuls of air, too aware of the cold sweat on my skin.

I had woken Todd.

“Lya?” He rubbed his face and sat up, peering at me through the dark. “Are you alright?”

“Just a nightmare,” I said, looking away through the dark room. I had them, sometimes. Never like that.

“You look like you’ve seen a demon,” Todd said, looking worried.

I shook my head, and crawled past him to get out of bed. “I need to pee.” The privvy would give me a few minutes alone, at least. In Kressos I had been safe, in Kressos, the Wolf couldn’t reach me, except in my memory.

I shut the privvy door and felt the last of my strength slip away. I slid to the floor with my back to the door, and wept as quietly as I could, a hand pressed over my mouth so that Todd wouldn’t come looking for me. 

#

I first saw Morhall after the autumn snows began. We had come out of the trees onto the open farmland that supported the castle, the bare fields speckled with what black mud and rotting plants still showed through the snow. The castle itself was built on the hilltop, walled round in the old style, dark grey in the low winter light. I remember how the air smelled like woodsmoke and cold dirt.

I was near the middle of the king’s retinue, where I might be both easily protected and supervised. My new husband rode just behind his guard, and all I saw of him during those hours spent riding north was the back of his white bear hide coat.

I liked the traveling. The air was clear and sharp in my lungs, and wherever we stopped to rest I was met with celebration, the new wife of the king. Poets flattered my beauty and grace, women sought to be chosen as my handmaid, but there was such a swirl of names and faces that they blurred together. I liked the traveling—but I was surrounded by people and sorely lonely.

I had brought my maidservant, Jida, with me. We were almost of an age, and had been playmates as children. She brushed and braided my hair in the mornings, and squeezed my shoulder when she saw the tears slipping down my face. “Is there anything I can do, Your Grace?”

I shook my head, and stared resolutely at my own reflection.

My new husband hardly spoke to me, and I rarely saw him at all except at night, and I found even that to be too much, and was relieved when he left me. I wanted to go home, to hug my brothers and lay my head in my mother’s lap and be a child again—but I was Princess Liana now, and Arborhall was no longer my home.

Jida rode next to me in the retinue, and gasped when she saw Morhall.

I felt my anxiety growing as we drew nearer, its high stone walls looming over us. There were twelve other wives, twelve women whose names I only vaguely knew, twelve women who all outranked me and—as my mother had warned me—would be suspicious of my arrival. They would want to take my measure. “Be considerate of their position,” my mother said, “be deferential—but do not allow them to turn you into a rug upon the floor. You are an Anarin, and you have wolf blood in you.”

I wished I was more convinced of that wolf blood, as we passed through the gates. I felt I could use a little more ferocity.

“Your Majesty! Your Majesty!” A maidservant came running as we dismounted, and our elk were taken to the stables. She dropped to her knees at Corasin’s feet and bowed her head. “Princess Róana has borne a son, Your Majesty.”

Corasin raised his hands in the air, and turned to the rest of us with a smile. “I have a son!” he called.

He had several sons, but I gave the celebratory cry that was expected of me along with everyone else. A prince had been born, a potential heir to his father’s throne. I searched my memory for the name Róana—if I was correct, she was Róana Cailin, northern born, the sister of Lord Cailin, with whom my father sometimes did business. Some ancestor of mine four or five generations back had married a Cailin man.

“Liana,” Corasin called to me, “come with me and meet my son.”

“Your Majesty?” I said, alarmed. “I—I shouldn’t wish to intrude on such an important moment—”

“Nonsense,” he replied, already turning away. “Come along.”

I steadied my heart and followed after, wishing I could at least freshen up, change out of my traveling clothes. If I had to intrude, I would rather have done it with the road washed off of me and my hair properly done. I prayed that Princess Róana was not the vengeful sort.

There were other wives who saw me as Corasin took me to Róana’s chambers, and I saw the question in their gazes as I followed him inside.

With her hair unbound, her face soft as she gazed at her newborn son, Róana Cailin was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. Her curly hair was copper red, her complexion a soft cool brown, with a constellation of dark freckles across her skin. When she looked up, her eyes were green, and I stopped where I stood, my mouth gone dry.

She saw me, and I saw her eyebrows rise. She recovered in a moment, when a young girl of about five or six darted from another part of the room, throwing her arms around Corasin’s legs, shouting, “Papa!” She had the same complexion as her mother, though her hair was brown, like Corasin’s, and her eyes dark.

Corasin laughed and scooped the girl up into his arms, kissing her forehead. Róana had a smile ready when he looked to her. “Born just a week ago,” she said, pulling the blanket back a little from the infant, who began to squirm. She cast me a glance, and said nothing. I hung back, thinking it best to keep silent until Corasin acknowledged me.

Corasin put down his daughter, patting her on the head, and lifted the infant into his arms. The boy gave a cry and Corasin kissed his son on the forehead, and looked to me, indicating that I should come over.

I glanced anxiously at Róana, and inclined my head to her. “Your Grace,” I said, “I am Liana Anarin.”

“So I supposed.” Róana smiled not unkindly, but I detected more uncertainty than warmth. “Please, don’t worry. I will be pleased to get to know you.”

Hesitantly, I stepped forward, and Corasin placed the child in my arms. “He’s beautiful,” I murmured.

“His name is Torsten,” Róana said, “after my father.”

I returned Torsten to his mother’s arms, and looked at the girl, clinging to her mother’s side. I smiled at her. “And what’s your name, Princess?”

She smiled shyly. “Ferhildr,” she said.

“That’s a lovely name,” I said. “I’m pleased to meet you, Princess Ferhildr.”

Róana put a hand on my shoulder, and my heart leapt into my throat. “And I you, Princess Liana.”

#

It rained, the day we left Nolsaford.

Senior Lieutenant Coren sent a messenger while we were breaking our fast that there was a court physician who had been sent to accompany us on our journey, and I knew the three of us shared the same sinking suspicion.

Lady Tyna looked very different, in her Sarenn traveling clothes. She still wore the physician’s black stripe, stitched on the sleeves of her wool coat, and around her neck she now wore the charm bag that denoted a Sarenn healer. It rattled softly as she turned in Coren’s office, and smiled at me. “Miss Sargis, I’m so happy to see you’re in good health.”

_“What are you doing here?”_ I asked, trying to hold my fury in check.

She answered me in Kressosi. “His Grace Prince Andon was concerned that the commander’s party may be attacked by Sarenn rebels on your journey. He wished to be sure that there was a skilled physician in your company.”

I would have her entrails for a necklace before I let her take Muras from me. _“Are you here as a spy or an assassin?”_

Lady Tyna smiled. _“That remains to be seen.”_

In the rain, Nolsaford had become little more than a mudslick. If Lady Tyna’s arrival alone had been enough to put me in a foul mood, it was not at all improved by the weather, and Bili must have sensed it, for he was somewhat more respectful than usual, only hanging his head low to convey his discontent with the situation.

I rode at the front of our little party, both because I was guide and because no one trusted Bili at all, and wished to be out of reach of hooves, antlers, and teeth.

We would follow trade routes that would be busy this time of year, protecting us at least a little from any would-be thieves or rebels, and when we began to encounter Hasi clans moving north for the summer, I would negotiate for us to be allowed to join them for a time, so that we need never be entirely on our own.

“Do you speak Hasi?” Todd had asked, when I told him my plan.

I snorted. “There are over two dozen Hasi peoples, each with their own language, and clan-specific dialects within those languages. I speak a little Atsa Hasi, but any negotiations are going to be done in Traveler’s Jargon.” In Sarenn it was called Trader’s Tongue, or Trader, for short.

I had feared that my Trader was rusty, but having spent the time skulking about Nolsaford that I had, with its many traders who were more Hasi than not, it had come back to me quicker than I expected.

There were a lot of things coming back to me.

Lady Tyna brought her elk—a handsome cow as dark as pine—up alongside me, and all I could see of her under her hood was the lower half of her face. “The fur is an interesting choice,” she said.

I wore the white wolf pelt over my wool coat, its head sitting over my hood, and the forelegs draped over my shoulders. Its weight was comforting, but more importantly, I suspected it would make any highwaymen reluctant to cross us. They would see me, and wish to avoid the witch.

I said nothing, keeping my eyes on the road.

_“The prince fears that your man is too sympathetic to our folk.”_

I glanced at her.

Lady Tyna’s green eyes peered out from under her hood, but only for a moment. _“Your man has been too obvious about his regrets. What the prince believes he will do, he did not say, but he wished to remove the commander from his sphere of influence. To place him in Saren may only strengthen his sympathy for us, but it will weaken his connections in Kressos. Any treasonous plots he may hatch can be attributed to your influence.”_

_“Why are you telling me this?”_

_“Because if your man does try to create dissent against the throne,”_ Lady Tyna said, _“I will be told to kill you both.”_

_“Isn’t that what you do?”_ I asked, cold. _“Why warn me?”_ Everyone determined to warn me, everyone determined to make my decisions for me.

Lady Tyna did not answer me immediately. _“I have my own motives, of which the prince is not aware. I suspect it is the same with you and your man. That is all.”_ She looked at me, nodded her head, and took her elk back further in the party, leaving me alone.

I spurred Bili to a trot, my jaw tight.

“I’ve seen that look before,” Todd said, catching up to me. He kept his gelding at a respectful distance, to avoid Bili taking a bite out of either of them. “What did she say to you?”

I tightened my grip on the reins. “She’s here to keep an eye on Muras,” I said.”So that Prince Andon may be assured he isn’t up to anything treasonous. Or so she tells me.” I lifted my chin, setting my eyes through the grey haze of the rain. “I’ll keep us on the path if you keep an eye on her.”

Todd laughed softly. “I wouldn’t take my eyes off that viper for all the perfume in Luon.” He nodded to me and he too fell away, and it was only me and Bili at the head of our party. I patted his shoulder, and drew in a breath. There was Sarenn air in my lungs once more, Sarenn food in my belly.

When I heard the wolves howling, I was not as afraid as I should have been. 

#

Kaspar once said to me that the heart of Kressosi business was the constant seeking of new markets and new resources. “It can’t go on forever,” he muttered, looking over the books. “There comes a time you run out of new buyers, new things to sell. Everything collapses. I might be dead before then, but my son? His sons?” Kaspar shook his head.

He would have been a handsome man, once. He still was, but I had grown acquainted with his weariness, his anxieties, his insecurities. He correctly diagnosed that he had a strong mind and a weak heart. Just because he could see what needed doing did not mean he could bring himself to do it. His family disdained him for his failings, resented him for his successes.

“What would you have them do?” I asked. Kaspar did not want to be reassured. My role was to provide some comfort, yes, but he couldn’t be soothed by soft words alone.

“I don’t know,” he muttered. “But domination and greed can only serve us for so long.” He looked to me. “Your father was a merchant, wasn’t he? How do the Sarenn manage their trade?”

Sarenn trade is an arrangement of mutual gain, I said. Oh, there is harsh bargaining, for sure, but both parties are meant to leave the arrangement satisfied that they at least gained a good price. A businessman who doesn’t abide by such a policy soon finds himself rejected by all his peers, and an outlaw in everything but name. In old clan law, to cheat someone in a trade was as good as murder. The Sarenn knows that he can’t survive without his fellows, and that to deny another what he needs may mean his death.

I told him that there are some things you do not touch, in Saren. Certain parts of the forest, certain aged trees belong to the gods, and to cut them down for timber is to invite a curse upon your house.

Among the Hasi, when a mammoth dies, they take the ivory to make sacred objects, or to sell—but never when it is a herd matriarch. The matriarch of a mammoth herd is a goddess, in her own right. When she dies, they burn the ivory, so that none can capture her spirit.

If you kill a white wolf, you cannot sell the pelt to any but a Sarenn.

What I did not say, because Kaspar was loathe to discuss politics where it did not affect business, was that Saren might never have come to be what it was, if not for Kressos.

We were more like the Hasi, once—clans that interacted, cooperated, competed, and sometimes warred—but when Kressos became one kingdom, Saren was forced to follow suit, or fall to Kressosi greed.  There is a certain Saren pride in that unity, but in the end, it did not save us from tyranny and greed.

I have grown so weary of kings.

#

“Andon is no Isaec and he knows it,” Muras muttered, warming his hands at the inn’s fireplace. “Isaec knows how to woo people, bring them back to his side. Andon doesn’t have half his charisma, but has twice the paranoia, so rather than solving a problem, he makes it go away.”

“Then I guess I can look forward to freezing my balls off in Morhall for the next several years,” Todd muttered.

“Maybe it’ll make you behave,” I replied, not looking up from my embroidery. I had drawn blood from my fingertips no less than three times, but I needed something that would keep my hands busy, or I was like to go mad with my mind running circles around itself.

“I have a hard time believing he’ll be willing to give up his best spy for long,” Muras murmured. “A winter or two, maybe, but not any longer than that. If he only wanted me dispatched, I’d be dead already. A sudden fever or unexpected heart attack.” He sipped at his beer. “It may be she’s only here to intimidate us.”

I pricked my finger with the needle again, and cursed, putting the injured fingertip to my mouth and putting my embroidery on the table. The helplessness of it all infuriated me more than anything else. If Muras Emiran could not or would not protect himself from a prince whose paranoia would surely destroy dozens of lives, if not hundreds or thousands, then what was there to gain by staying with him? Why, even in knowing that I would be killed too, could I not bring myself to do the wise thing, and leave?

Muras himself said that Kaspar would likely take me back. Then at least I would have one of my sons again.

I gave a frustrated noise and started to collect my needle and thread, intending to put it away, when the man watching our table caught my eye.

He sat not far from us, nursing his beer and gazing directly at me. His long black hair was braided down his back, with no ribbons or wire to signify that he was of any wealth. He scowled when I met his eyes, and spit a name at me I had not heard before: “Vulgafra.” Wolf-woman.

If neither Todd nor Muras knew what the word meant, they knew the tone, and both bristled, ready to rise to my defense. I raised my hand to stop them, not eager to begin a fight. _“Why do you call me that?”_ I asked.

The man stared at me with open contempt, and jerked his head at the wolf pelt I had spread across my lap to keep me warm. _“Wolf-worshipers belong in the north,”_ he said, _“where they can freeze with their cursed god. And you, traveling with Kressosi rats,”_ he turned a poisonous glance at the men, _“your mother ought to have smothered you in your cradle.”_

I bared my teeth at him. _“My mother sharpened my teeth on the bones of cowards like you.”_

He called me a name which I shall not repeat, and began to rise, but stopped cold when I pointed my left hand toward him, the first two fingers extended flat and the thumb stretched out to the side. It was a gesture any Sarenn would recognize, the Witch’s Hand. _“Touch me or my men and the wolves will devour your children,”_ I said. _“I have called the Wolf down from the ice and lived to tell the tale.”_

We had drawn the attention of nearly everyone in the inn, even the Kressosi soldiers who could not understand us.

_“Witch,”_ the man sneered, so that he could have the last word before he retreated. I let my hand fall to my lap. The room seemed to breathe easier, then.

“What was that?” Todd asked.

“Best we lock our door tonight,” I said, not taking my eyes off of the man. “And best we not linger too long in the morning.”

“That was quite the little show,” Lady Tyna said, appearing from the shadows with her cup clutched in white knuckles. “Do you mean to get us all killed, making people think you meddle in witchcraft?”

I ignored her, taking a swallow of beer. Muras looked at me in surprise, and I stared into my cup.

“That bit about calling down the Winter Wolf was really something,” Tyna said, well and truly angry, “is that why you take that pelt everywhere? So you can playact as a Vulgahäks?”

I rose sharply and turned, hardly more than a breath of space between Lady Tyna and myself. She was a head taller than me, but I glared back at her with fire in my gut. _“It isn’t playacting,”_ I snarled. _“I owe a price.”_

There was a heavy silence between us. _“Are you going north to die, then?”_ she asked, a note of derision in her voice.

_“It’ll save you the trouble.”_ I snatched my embroidery up from the table, the wolf pelt over my arm, and moved to the stairs with Muras on my heels. That that woman would dare challenge me, treat me as if I were being reckless with our safety, when her entire purpose for being there—

“Lya,” Muras said, shutting the door behind us. “What did you say to that man?”

I put my embroidery on the table in the corner, held the wolf pelt to my breast. “I told him that if he harmed any of us, I would curse him. That I had called down the Winter Wolf before, and survived it. That way he would know to be afraid of me.”

Muras muttered a curse under his breath. I brought the fur to my cheek. “Don’t act as if you understand this place,” I said, my temper wearing. “I know better than anyone the risks of displays like that.”

“And what made you think it was worth it?” Muras demanded.

“‘You, traveling with Kressosi rats,’” I intoned, “‘Your mother should have smothered you in the cradle.’”

I had the satisfaction of that rendering Muras speechless. “You don’t understand this place,” I told him, “and when I make the decision to take that kind of risk, I would appreciate it if you did not side with Lady Tyna against me.”

Muras put a hand on my back. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You’re right, I don’t understand. I entrusted this journey to you and it was my mistake.” His mouth quirked up at the corner. “Todd says I’m too used to being in command.”

“You are,” I replied, but softly. I drew my hand down my face, my head spinning. The threat of a curse had come so naturally to me, as if of course, the first thing I should threaten would be witchery. Wolf-witchery, at that. “We really shouldn’t stay long,” I said. “I won’t do this often—but that man was ready to do something… unwise.”

Muras pressed his lips to my forehead. “I’m going down to fetch Todd.” He met my gaze. “Lock the door until I get back.” 

#

Róana became my best and only friend in Morhall. She was Corasin’s sixth wife, and had been in Morhall for several years—but Ferhildr was the first of her children to survive infancy. She tended anxiously to Torsten, though she clearly had a great deal of practice at concealing that anxiety. She forbade any wetnurse to even come near her son.

“The other wives,” she told me, “they fear losing their beauty will mean losing His Majesty’s affection. They’re fools. It’s the children that matter, and I’ll not have any other woman nursing my son.”

There were always children in Morhall. Some of my husband’s children were as old as I was, and they paid me no mind. I was not their mother, nor anyone who had any considerable influence.

“You have two brothers, yes?” Róana asked, walking with me in the corridors, where we were sheltered from the wind as winter began to set in.

“Three,” I said. “All younger.”

“Perhaps Ferhildr will marry an Anarin,” she said. “I think His Majesty would not disapprove. It’s warm there, isn’t it?”

“Compared to here,” I said, which made her laugh.

I loved her smile, the way it lit up her entire face. Róana was a woman whose presence glowed like a hearth fire, and I was happy to bask in her warmth as long as she would permit me. Being around Róana made me forget how vastly unhappy I was.

In Arborhall I was used to having a wide circle: cousins, servants, visitors, merchants and their families, travelers on their way to or from other places. I had polished my Aziran and Trader’s Tongue speaking to traders and businessmen, and picked up the faintest bit of Luo that I’ve long since forgotten. My childhood had been one filled with people coming and going, people who were willing to entertain the curiosities of a Sarenn girl and be amused by her interest.

In Morhall, I only had Róana and Jida. Róana warned me that I should not speak much with any men, if I could avoid it, as it would make it too easy for the other wives to accuse me of adultery if they held a grudge against me. I could not speak to too many maidservants, or other wives’ children, for fear of spying. And as for the king—well, he had no interest in anything a seventeen year old girl had to say.

I wrote to my family nearly every day, just for something to do. I began to embroider small tapestries for each of my brothers, because it was painstaking work that filled hours at a time, until my neck ached and my eyes burned.

For all that trouble and misery, I made no enemies over the course of that first winter I spent in Morhall.

Trouble came with the spring.

Julas had come to visit me with our mother, and I was careful that they never saw me without a smile. I was a princess of Saren, after all, what right did I have to be ungrateful?

Julas knew me too well for that. He waited until our mother was asleep to ask me how I was doing, and I ended up in tears, telling him about how lonely I was, how he was right, I should have married Lord Cader, and the only friend I had there was Princess Róana. I asked Julas not to tell our mother, it would only distress her. He agreed, and I was fool enough to think that was the end of it.

Instead, he waited until he had returned to Arborhall to tell our father. I know what he must have thought: our father had always had a soft-spot for me. I was his only daughter, his eldest child. He would not leave me miserable and alone.

What our father chose to do was to come to Morhall with his own lawyer that summer, giving me no warning whatsoever, to petition the king to divorce me. He would return my brideprice, he said, and he gave his sincerest apologies, but he no longer believed that I was suited to the marriage. It was in my best interests, he said, that I be returned to my family.

I was mortified, and when Corasin called me forth in front of the entire hall to ask if I was unhappy, of course I denied it. I said that His Majesty had given me a great gift, and I was sorry that my father believed I was unhappy, it had only been a private confession to my brother in a moment of homesickness, I would adjust soon enough.

My father was unconvinced, but he could do nothing if I myself did not seek divorce, so he was forced to leave. “If you need me, Liana,” he said, squeezing my hands so tightly that they hurt, “call for me, and I will come.”

I promised him I would, knowing full well that I would not. He had humiliated in me in front of the king’s court, and worse, I knew in my gut that I should have told the truth, I should have gone home with my father, and waited a year to remarry.

I was anathema, after that. Corasin, who had already spoken little to me, spoke even less, though I noticed no difference in the amount of visits I received from him. The other wives, who had only just begun to be a little less wary of me, no longer spoke to me for fear of association with my ingratitude.

Except Róana.

“I am sorry,” she said, when she came to visit me. “When I told my father how lonely I was, he told me not to be so weak and spoiled.” She grimaced at me, Torsten at her breast. “You should have gone home, but I am glad you stayed.”


	4. Witch God

The summer in Saren is a mild season that washes the world in a thousand hues of green, and speckles it with flowers. Foxglove, lion’s tooth, aster, daisy, wild rose. The first of the berries were ripening as we passed through Wetasur, the estate of the Alfer family. I had written the letter in Sarenn, though as an officer of King Isaec’s army, Muras was not required to give notice to the hall’s whose hospitality he sought. I thought that a little courtesy might go a long way for smoothing over any ruffled feathers.

The new Lord Alfer had taken his title only a year before. He was hardly twenty, a young man named Barwald. I was pleased to find that he still wore his hair in the Sarenn style, with the braid beginning at his crown to indicate his status. Many men of influence had cut it short after the war, to better ingratiate themselves with the Kressosi and maintain their power.

“Commander,” the young Lord Barwald said graciously, his Kressosi speech methodical and practiced. “I trust your elk have been seen to.” 

Muras acknowledged that they had, though he prayed for whoever was tasked with looking after the half-wild bull. There was some talk over accommodations, or some such. Nothing that I considered of interest enough to distract me from the first proper tapestry I had seen in seven years. The one in the main hall of Thralduslodge was massive, sixteen feet long and at least seven feet high. I walked along its length, taking in every stitch of color.

The center of the piece was a massive brown bear, stood on its hind legs. Around it there seemed to be scenes of a story, a warrior accompanied by Weta, the club-footed god, the Carrion-Maker. The warrior’s birth, weapons gifted to him by Weta, followed by a life full of battle, and his death, at the hands of Weta himself.

“My twice great-grandmother made that,” Lord Alfer said, stepping to my side. “It took her years to complete.”

“It’s been years since I’ve seen something so beautiful, My Lord,” I said. “Your family history?”

Lord Alfer nodded, his hands clasped behind his back. “The story of my ancestor, Alferi Bearskin.” He smiled slightly at me. “According to the story, he transformed into a bear in battle. A gift of Weta, in exchange for his tongue.”

“He was mute?” I asked.

Lord Alfer nodded. “So goes the story.” He looked at me a moment. “You’re Sarenn, then?”

I nodded. “From Arborhall.”

“I should like to visit there soon,” Lord Alfer said. “I consider Lord Anarin a friend.”

“The lord is in good health, I hope?” I asked.

Lord Alfer nodded. “Just welcomed his first son into the world, I believe. Orvas.”

What a terrible name. What kind of wife did he have that would give a child that name? “Orvas Anarin,” I murmured. “Hmm. Time will only tell what sort of lord he will make.”

“Yes,” Lord Alfer said, _“with that Kressosi mother of his.”_

He had turned away, and thus missed the way I looked at him, unable to hide my shock.

I felt off-balance, and suddenly nauseous. I stumbled out into the open air, and put my hands to my knees, trying to steady myself.

Of course. Of course; as I had found it necessary to ensure my survival through Kressosi men, Julas must have seen it advantageous to take a Kressosi wife, to show his commitment to peace, to the king he now owed his fealty to.

A Kressosi woman was raising the heirs to my family’s house.

This, too, was a punishment.

#

The stories say that Weta came to Saren with the elk, who wander as he does. Weta is a restless god, and though his right foot is twisted and he walks with a limp, Weta is ever a traveler. He delights in all that excites the heart: in feasts and drink, in dance and lust, in war, in madness. He seeks hidden things, forbidden things. Ever Weta is hungry, ever Weta reaches deeper.

Small wonder they call him both bloodbrother and adversary to the Wolf. Their relationship is a contentious one, they go from allies and friends to bitter enemies in the space of a heartbeat, like starving beasts over a carcass. There are a thousand stories about how they came to swear brotherhood to each other, each as true as the next.

Weta, feeder of vultures and ravens.

Weta, the bargainer, the sorcerer.

His gifts, too, come with a price—though they are often less predictable than the Wolf’s. Some are clear: the gift of Sight in exchange for one or both eyes, strength in exchange for a hand or foot. Then there are those less clear, as in the case of Alferi Bearskin: the ability to change forms, in exchange for a tongue.

Laying beside Muras that night, my belly full of elk meat and wild rice and last autumn’s cider, I thought a great deal of Weta. My father had not made many sacrifices to Weta that I could remember. What Weta dealt in had little to do with the life of a lord whose land was filled with sheep and goats, except on the occasion that Kressosi raiders crossed the Lor, and my father was willing to call on any god who might send them back. He had spoken of Weta most when he traveled.

Weta, god of the long road and the narrow forest path.

Weta taught us to write, they say, and they also say that it was Weta who taught witches their craft, when he stole the knowledge from _Ima Spinna,_ Mother Spider, who weaves all truth into being. (It was the Hasi, who taught other Sarenn about Ima Spinna, and it was Ima Spinna who taught us to sew and weave and braid our hair.)

It was restlessness that roused me from bed. Neither Muras or Todd woke, so I was free to pull my riding skirts and a coat on, making my way down to the stables, not conscious of the fact that I was barefoot until I felt the straw under my feet.

Bili was awake and alert, as if he’d been expecting me. I put the bridle on him, but not the saddle, pulling myself over his back and taking myself out into Alferi’s hunting woods. I didn’t think it strange, at the time, that the stable doors were open and I encountered no one awake or asleep. Nor did I think it strange that I was not telling Bili where to go, but he walked with purpose.

It was perhaps half an hour before I noticed the shapes falling in alongside us. They were small, human-like, but hairier, with slumped shoulders and long faces, cow tails whipping behind them. Trolls, I realized, with surprise. They road on the backs of elk, or hung from the limbs of trees, their eyes glinted golden in the moonlight. There must have been dozens of them, following me through the forest.

Gradually, I realized they were chanting something.

_Vulgafra, vulgafra, vulga- vulga- vulgafra!_

It was hardly more than a whisper in the trees at first, and it had none of the poison of the man who had first called me that. It seemed almost… deferential.

Bili led us deeper into the forest, into huge old pines and cedars and thick tangles of brush that I could not imagine Alfer did much hunting in. The forest was too wild here.

The deeper we went, the louder the trolls’ chanting grew, until I was certain the very trees were shaking with it. My knuckles were white around Bili’s reins, but I trusted him to take me wherever we were bound. Even had I wanted to flee, the trolls were packed too tight around us now, with a herd of elk the size of which I had never seen.

The trolls only began to part as they filled a sudden clearing, spreading about it in a circle, leaving Bili and myself in the middle, in the grey dark, alone. There was cold sweat on my back, but I held my breath steady, searching the clearing for some indication of why I was here.

The trolls fell silent, and in the absence of their voices, I could hear my heartbeat in my ears. My breath seemed painfully loud.

The figure that approached from the trees sat astride a huge bull elk, much older than Bili, his antlers somehow already losing their velvet, even though it was nowhere near the rut.It was only as the figure drew closer that I realized there was no velvet on the bull’s antlers at all—it was lichen, hanging in long chunks from the bare points, which were weathered and green.

The man who sat astride the bull—for I could see now he was a man—was older, though he had no beard. His hair was iron streaked with steel, and the braid he wore began at his forehead, marking him high as a king. It was long enough to be folded upon itself and tied to the nape of his neck in gold wire, with the middle section still hanging over his shoulder. Past his prime, but he carried himself the way a warrior did.

His face was lined with scars as much as age, and he greeted me with a smile that was as much a leer as anything else. “Vulgafra,” he said, “so good to finally meet you.”

When he turned so that his bull stood alongside Bili, facing the opposite direction, I saw that his feet were bare, and that the right one was twisted.

The clubfooted god.

I looked up and met his gaze. Weta’s eyes were as black as a raven’s, and twice as sly. “What do you want with me?”

Weta laughed, and it shook the forest. “Blunt. I see why they like you. He never did have a taste for dancing with words.” He waved a hand at me. “Come. Play a game with me.” He swung down from his bull’s back, and I followed suit. There was a tree stump I had not noticed before, worn smooth as a tabletop. From the pocket of his coat, Weta produced a deck of cards in a silver case, and sat cross-legged on one side of the stump, gesturing for me to sit across from him.

I watched him shuffling the cards, and thought of Todd complaining when the soldiers he spent the nights cavorting with emptied his pockets for him. I had little I was willing to risk in gambling with gods.

“You know how to play King’s Court, I hope?” Weta asked, his teeth gleaming like a snow lion’s. “A lady of such circumstance as yourself—it would be a bitter shame if you couldn’t play.”

“I know the game.” Best to keep my guard up, I thought. Best to keep my eyes open.

The trolls watched us in eerie silence from the trees, shadowy forms with sparkling eyes. Bili was in remarkably good behavior, standing next to Weta’s bull. Weta shuffled the cards, and spread them before us. “What are we gambling over?” I asked.

“Questions, of course,” Weta said. “For every round you win, you get to ask me any question you like. The same for me.”

“Must I answer truthfully?”

Weta’s grin spread too wide across his face. “Of course not. But if you lie, so shall I.”

“You could lie even if I did not,” I countered.

“True,” Weta said, “but she would be unhappy with me, and for the moment, I would prefer if we remained friends.” Weta leaned across to look me in the eyes. “He is not the only one who sees promise in you, Vulgafra.” His eyes seemed to absorb any light that fell upon them. “Do we have a deal?”

I looked down at the cards before me, and picked up my hand.

King’s Court is a complex game, one that requires a quick mind that can assess several possibilities at once. It’s a favored game of nobility in Sarenn and beyond, one which my father had only allowed me to learn because it kept me from tormenting my tutors for a few hours every day. In general, he disapproved of gambling, but my skill for it had, upon occasion, greased the wheels of a few trade deals, and so he frowned over it a little less.

I had played against my share of skilled opponents, but with Weta, I was careful.

“Tch, come now, Vulgafra,” he said, “wars are not won with shields alone.”

“And yet many lives are lost for lack of one,” I said. “Your move.”

The first round went to Weta. The trolls chanted his name three times, and again went silent. For a moment I saw not the old man but a young one, the kind who might be daring enough to steal from Ima Spinna. He was soon gone, the old battle-hardened man in his place once more. Weta put his elbows on the stump, leaning over the cards. “Who are you?”

I blinked. “My name—”

“Not your name,” Weta said. “Who are you?”

I gazed at him, pondering my answer. “I am a daughter of Anar,” I said, “I am a granddaughter of Liane, descended of wolves. I am the mother of the last son of Corasin Forset, and I am the witch who brought the Winter Wolf to Morhall.”

Weta grinned. “Some witch,” he said, “who knows nothing of that craft except the name of my bloodbrother.”

“It is what they call me,” I said.

“They call you wrong.” Weta put his hands flat on the stump. “You are no witch. You are something else.”

“Tell me what I am, then,” I said, annoyed, but Weta held up a finger.

“Ah, ah,” he said. “First, you must win.”

Again, I lost, again, the trolls chanted Weta’s name. It called to mind some saying, about how when you were gambling with a god, it was best not to bet anything you didn’t want to lose.

Weta flipped the king card between his fingers, the red face of the king flickering in and out of view. “What do you want, Vulgafra Anarsdaughter?”

I considered my answer, trying to guess what exactly it was he was asking. “I want Saren to be free,” I said at last.

“What does that mean?”

“You’ll have to win another hand to ask me that,” I replied, and Weta laughed and shuffled the cards together.

This time, I was the one who threw the king card down, his solemn red face seeming almost to shine in the moonlight. The trolls chanted “Vulgafra!” three times, and I considered which question to ask. I could not be sure I would be able to ask all the questions I had, so I could not squander the opportunity. More, I had to ask it in a way that could not be wiggled around. I looked up, my fingers on the card. “What does the Wolf want me to do?”

“Three kings will die on your account,” Weta said, his thumb under his chin. “The first already has. The second will before two winters have passed. And the third—a son of Liane will be the one who fells him.”

“But what am _I_ to do?” I pressed.

Weta smiled. “When the Wolf howls, so will you.”

That was no answer at all, but Weta was already shuffling, and the next hand begun.

King’s Court is a game that belongs to the player who seizes the best hand from their opponents. With only two, it is difficult to win more than one hand in a row, and for a third time I lost to Weta. “If Saren were free, as you want it to be, what would that mean?”

The air was cold, and my patience was waning, but I did not want to give a hasty answer.  “I would have no more kings,” I said. “The people of Saren must create a new way of living together.”

Weta seemed to ponder that a moment, and nodded, shuffling the cards.

I had the sense, when I won that round, that Weta had allowed me to win. “What do you want with me?” I demanded.

Weta smiled. “I want a woman who will shake the world, Vulgafra.” He stood, signaling that our game was over. “I have a gift for you.”

I watched him, wary. “In exchange for what?”

“A negotiable price,” he replied. 

#

I did not remember how I had returned to Thralduslodge when I woke. A dream, I thought, until I saw it.

Hanging by a leather strap from the back of the chair where my coat was thrown, an old ivory horn, its trumpet carved to resemble the head of a wolf.

I threw the blankets back to find my feet dirty, and had to draw in a breath.

I looked back to the horn. _When the Wolf howls, so will you._ I slipped out of bed, careful not to wake Muras or Todd, and wrapped the horn in one of my underskirts, hiding it in my bag. I pulled a robe over my nightdress, and gathered up my clothes to take myself to the lodge’s women’s bath, fed by the hot springs the lodge had been built over.

I scrubbed the dirt from my feet and sat on the edge of the bath, the steam making sweat roll down my back. I thought on a touch that felt like fire and warmed me to the bone, kisses that landed like lightning.

_I like you, Vulgafra. Shame you aren’t actually a witch._

Three kings would die on my account, he said. Corasin was the first. ‘A son of Liane’ would fell the third. One of my sons? Or my brothers? And how or why? I had more questions than I had begun with, but I did not think I would be seeing Weta again any time soon. He had played his part, now I was supposed to play mine.

Whatever my part was.

I washed my face and limbs, grateful that the heat took the ache out of my shoulders, and when I was dressed I found my way to the hall where breakfast was laid out. Warm milk sweetened with honey and cloves, beef sausages, a bread that was baked with cheese and herbs and was still warm from the ovens. I was hungrier than I had thought, and ate until my belly ached and the sight of food sickened me.

“I wondered where you’d gotten off to,” Todd said, sliding onto the bench next to me. “Sleep well?”

I shrugged, and distracted him by filling his cup.

“I swear,” he said, amused, “you Sarenn serve milk at every meal.”

“Keeps the flesh on your bones when the winter’s cold,” I said. “Better get used to drinking hot milk.” I smiled at him, and sipped at my own, hoping that the heaviness in my stomach wouldn’t make me drowsy.

“Suppose I should,” Todd said, regarding his cup. “You suppose there are many spices at Morhall?”

There had used to be. I hadn’t appreciated, at the time, the amount of money and work that went into the food. I didn’t much trust Kressosi soldiers to keep up that effort. “Muras has enough pull to get them, if there aren’t,” I said. “Gods help us all, though, if the brewers are bad.”

We were to spend three days in Thralduslodge, giving our elk and ourselves a chance to rest, a time that I spent wandering the halls of the lodge, gazing at tapestries and carvings of ivory and cedar, bone and pine. Gods, heroes, histories and legends. I soaked it in like balm on my soul, this part of myself that I had been denied since I fled to Kressos.

I learned from Lord Alfer’s men that several Atsa Hasi clans had already passed through on their way north for the summer, following the mammoth herds, but being a much smaller group not bound to the schedule of mammoths, we would likely catch up with them in a few weeks.

I had forgotten that it was the Atsa who passed through Wetasur. I wondered, for a moment, if it was possible—but I pushed the thought aside.

Veland would be nearly seven, by now.

Lady Tyna occupied her time tending to the soldiers in our party. Travel runs afoul of some men’s bowels, and I regularly saw her dosing men with teas of lion’s tooth root, or mint, or a mix of astringents that would stop their bowels rather than move them. Something to tend to the cough he had picked up in the rain, something to clear the nasal passages, something to treat saddle sores. It seemed a rather unpleasant business to me, but it kept her busy, and thus away from myself.

In my meandering through the lodge, I was surprised to come across Muras, gazing contemplatively at an aged tapestry depicting a battle. “Tapestries are women’s work, aren’t they?” he asked, when he noticed me.

I nodded. “They are.”

“So a woman… spent months… years… on all this.” He gestured to the scene, men dying impaled on swords and spears, decapitated, relieved of their limbs, carried off to the halls of the dead. Certainly too much for a delicate Kressosi woman.

“Women are the history keepers of their families,” I said, “it was a task granted us by Mother Spider, as were the threads.” I glanced at him, and back to the tapestry. “Are you going to ask me what it depicts?”

“A battle, it seems.”

“Not just any battle.” I pointed to the army on the left, the ones portrayed as monstrous, nearly demonic, with long tongues and teeth, faces more like dogs than men. “The first time that men who called themselves ‘Kressosi’ crossed the Lor.” 

#

The Wolf, the first time I truly laid eyes on them, was as all the stories said. Bigger than a bear, fur blinding white. A black nose snuffed at my red silks, and prodded me onto his back, where I sank deep into the coarse fur, and was sheltered from the wind.

She ran, then, though I could not have said how he knew the way, galloping through that featureless white. I held on because I did not know what else to do, because I believed that they would kill me, and I surely deserved it.

I don’t know how long he ran, but it was long enough that I lost myself to exhaustion, and when I woke, I was under the dark of a mammoth hide, by a fire, being tended to by an Atsa Hasi woman hardly older than myself, with a baby at her side. Her name was Pitalani, the granddaughter and apprentice of the clan’s healer.

She told me the Wolf brought me to them, that they were to protect and care for me. They called me Wolf Sister, and did not ask my name. They fed me. They gave me warm clothes to wear and they did not ask where I came from. They cared for me in their winter camp. They sold my silk dress and my slippers and when it became obvious I was pregnant they gave me a protective charm to wear, for the health of my child. A piece of ivory, carved in the shape of a wolf’s head.

For Hasi children, they are usually mammoths.

Veland was born in the spring, as the Hasi were preparing to move north again. He was a big baby, and it was a hard birth. I owe my life to Pitalani and her grandmother. They sang over Veland when they had washed him and put him in my arms, took the ivory charm from my neck and secured it in his swaddling. They asked his ancestors and theirs to protect him. To them, Veland was as good as their own kin.

They had offered a place among their clan for me, a husband who would provide for me and my boy. He was Pitalani’s brother, a little younger than myself, a skilled hunter who any Hasi woman would have been proud to call her husband.

I was not Hasi. I did not want to follow a mammoth herd on elkback for the rest of my life, and most especially I did not want to go north in the summer, back to Morhall, back to that cursed place I had already spilled so much blood to escape from.

I asked them to take care of Veland. If I was caught, at least they need never find him. If I was examined and shown to have given birth, they could never prove that the child had not been stillborn, or perished after. He would be safe with the Atsa, and he would be fed, and I would run as far away from Morhall as I could get, and bury the girl I had been in the northern snow where her bones would be scattered by the carrion birds.

Pitalani adopted him as her own son, a younger brother to her girl, who was just ready to be weaned. I wept when I put him in her arms.

Liana Anarin died the day Morhall fell.

Lya Sargis was born the day I left the Atsa, and crossed the Lor into Kressos, with nothing but a bundle of Hasi clothes and the blood on my hands.

#

I found Lady Tyna packing up her medicines and tools the morning we were to leave Wetasur. “Do you require treatment for something, Miss Sargis?” she asked, not looking up. “Something for the bowels, perhaps? Headaches, poor sleep, your cycle?”

I gritted my teeth. “I need an examination.”

Lady Tyna paused, and looked at me. “For?”

“I’ve not had my cycle since before Nolsaford.”

“Ah.” She considered me again for a moment. “If I might inquire as to why you cannot simply wait to be sure—”

“I don’t know how well prepared Morhall will be for an infant,” I said. “I would rather be sure myself that… we are prepared.”

Lady Tyna nodded. “I was first trained as a midwife.”

“Your skills know no end,” I said dryly.

“Well, I could hardly convince the Kressosi of the usefulness of a female physician if I couldn’t also deliver their wife’s children,” she said, pulling a sheet from her bag so that if we were interrupted, my modesty wouldn’t be compromised.

“I suppose you’ve delivered Princess Arabel’s children.”

“I have. The ones that were born after I came to serve the throne, at any rate.” Her tone was different, now. Less purposefully irritating, I would determine later. She had adopted the tone of a professional physician.

I had never undergone this sort of examination, and was none too eager to have Lady Tyna to be the first to perform it for me, but nor was I eager to ask Lord Alfer’s healer, who looked old enough to be my great-grandmother, and had frigid cold hands. Lady Tyna, I noted, warmed her hands at the coalburner before she began.

“Well,” she murmured, sitting back when the examination was over. “Congratulations, Miss Sargis.”

I swung my legs off the cot and pulled my riding skirts on once more, wondering when I would tell Muras and Todd.

“Have you been pregnant before?” Lady Tyna asked.

“Yes.”

“Were you given to morning sickness?”

“No.” I had been blessed in that regard.

“Any other particular maladies that you noticed?”

I tried to remember. Both my previous pregnancies had been so swallowed up by their circumstances—my fear, with Veland, and my desires to leave, with Kip—that I could scarcely recall anything else. “I couldn’t much sleep, toward the end. Kicked too much.” Both my boys had seemed determined to burst their way out of my ribs. My mother had complained of the same, with me and my brothers.

“Hm, I’ll have to see what I can do about that. Not much I can do to quiet the child, but perhaps I can get you to sleep in spite of them.” She shrugged her shoulders. Very carefully, she asked, “was your previous child… did they thrive?”

“Yes. They were healthy.”

Lady Tyna nodded. “I’m glad to hear it.” 

#

Of Corasin’s other wives, one took particular objection to me.

Princess Solema’s family was Aziran in origin, but had settled in Saren some generations back and sworn fealty to the king. They were still considered new, among the nobility, and perhaps that was what made Solema so determined to hold as much of Corasin’s favor as she could, which—by the time I arrived—must have been quite difficult.

Of each of Corasin’s twelve other wives, Solema was the only one who had borne no children.

The threat that I represented may have been too much for her to bear. I became pregnant during my second year at Morhall.

I was poisoned shortly after it became known, and though I survived, the child did not.

The truth is that I am not and have never been certain that it was Solema who poisoned me, but it was to her that everyone looked and cast their accusations.

I was kept in solitude, while her trial was held. Only my mother, who had come from Arborhall to visit me, was permitted to see me. Corasin claimed it was for my protection.

Whatever evidence was found or testimony given, it was enough that the lawyers Solema’s father sent were not able to protect her. She was guilty not just of attempting to murder a wife of the king, but of successfully murdering one of the king’s children. Neither crime could go unpunished, and together, they had to be answered.

I was brought out of solitude to witness. All the wives were gathered on the walls of Morhall. To warn us, I think.

Solema was cast out of the gates, with no coat, no furs, no shoes. It was only just after midwinter, and the wind was so fierce that it cut under even the bearskin I wore. I cannot imagine what it was like for Solema.

The townsfolk were forbidden to shelter or aid her, and were in fact encouraged to drive her out. I remember tears freezing to my lashes, and I could not watch, but I knew I was not permitted to look away, so I let them freeze my lashes together, and obscure my vision.

She died of exposure, and because the court had determined her a murderer, her body was left for carrion. Her spirit would never know rest, would never reach the halls of the dead.

I was violently ill, for weeks after. I couldn’t sleep. I could barely eat. My mother says that in that time the flesh melted off my bones like candle wax. She had the mirrors removed from my chambers, I was such a grim sight, she feared seeing my reflection would only hasten my death.

I remember a dark room, a fire in the hearth, and an old woman with bony fingers that hurt because I had no flesh left to protect my limbs. Someone held me up, in front of the fire, and the old woman burned herbs on the coals, herbs that made me choke, and cough, and the old woman sought to cast the ghost out of me, to drive Solema back into the wilderness once more.

I recovered after that, but I do not believe Solema was ever driven from my bones. I believe she burrowed deeper, buried herself in the secret halls of my heart. I believe she found our common cause, made her mind one with my own.

Our feud was not with each other, and it never had been.

Our hate burned in my chest, hot and fierce, the aching desperate need to exact our revenge on the man we called our husband. 

#

The sun shone warm and bright that morning. The wolf skin was too hot to wear, as was my coat, so I rode with it across the front of my saddle. The fur seemed even brighter in the sunlight, and I was glad to be traveling again.

We took the road through the forest, and it was in leading our little party I spied a clearing I recognized, and hesitated.

“What is it?” Muras asked. He had been riding by my side, though at a distance, as Bili seemed to be in an especially foul temper that morning. I had been forced to prevent him from charging or kicking the men in Lord Alfer’s stables no less than half a dozen times before I was able to get him outside.

I had not told him anything about my meeting with Weta. However charitable he might have been toward my beliefs, I could not fathom that he would believe it was anything but a dream. Gods were not real to Muras the way they were to me. “Nothing,” I said, “just… a peculiar feeling. As if I’ve been here before.”

We were bound due north, to an old trade road that would be dotted not so much with towns as places where one could find taverns and brothels, which supported the small villages nearby.  Even with that, it would be a lonely journey, and we would spend more than a few nights camping along the road when we were too far from any such place by nightfall.

Very occasionally when I was young, my father had traveled with trade caravans out of Arborhall. He was a restless man, he had been his father’s third son, and had hoped to sail on Anarin trade ships, before his elder two brothers died, one in battle and the other of a fever. Now that he was lord, the trade caravans were as far as he allowed himself to roam from his responsibilities, leaving Arborhall in the care of my mother.

He liked to take Julas and me with him. Corvin and Tatton were too young, but Julas and I learned to ride alongside those caravans, practiced our Trader’s Tongue, and amused our father with our delights in ‘discovering’ new places. This particular route I had never taken with father, because he deemed it too far to take his children, and too long a journey for him to be away from home. Still, I could see in my mind the maps on which this road had been drawn, and once upon the road, it would not take much to keep us on our course.

I knew what the way to Morhall was. It was the cursed star I set my compass by.

If it is true that a corpse buried incomplete, or not at all, haunts the earth forever, then I was returning to the place where Corasin was buried without his head, bearing the child of the man who had taken it off.


	5. Howl

I brushed my hair while Lady Tyna ground herbs in her mortar and pestle. We had come to something of an uneasy truce, in the days following our departure from Wetasur, and though I still did not trust her, I preferred her company to that of the soldiers, who only treated me with any kind of respect because they feared Muras’ reprisal if they acted inappropriately. Even if I did not like her, we could talk in words that were familiar to us. We didn’t have to explain ourselves to each other.

Our party was camped along the banks of a small river which ran cold and fast. I had quietly made the appropriate offerings to the god of the river, while no one paid me any mind. I didn’t wish for anyone to drown or take a chill in its waters.

One of the soldiers played a wooden flute, leaned up against a supply wagon. Muras was brushing down his elk, and Todd was playing cards with three or four soldiers by lantern light. It would have been almost peaceful, except that every now and then the men would all look up, hearing the distant roaring of snow lions. The soldiers kept their rifles near at hand, and their eyes on the darkness. 

_“Do you think we should tell them lions only kill men in winter when game is scarce?”_ Lady Tyna asked, scraping her powdered herbs into a pot of boiling water. She made the same tea every night, said she couldn’t sleep without it.

_“I’ve found it does little to ease their fear.”_ I had tried to tell Muras as much, but it had not prevented him from ordering a watch for the previous few nights, and it would not stop him from ordering another that night. It made the men feel better, to have a watch.

We had begun to come across evidence of the Atsa’s passing. It was difficult to mistake mammoth dung for anything but what it was, and the old campfires smothered in dirt that followed the mammoth paths made it certain.

We came across a dead mammoth the following day. It must have perished the winter before, because what was left of it was mostly bone and scraps of weathered hide, the flesh long since scavenged or rotted away. The tusks were sawn off, and the ribs gone. The Atsa used them to construct their mammoth hide tents. The teeth were gone, too, for jewelry, for carvings.

“I always forget how big they are,” Todd murmured, standing in front of the skull. “I never saw a mammoth, before I came to Saren. Then the first one I lay eyes on… it was in battle.”

I rested my hand on his arm while Todd told me about it, his first year as an officer, “green as a spring sapling and twice as dumb.” He was stationed at a garrison on the Kressosi side of the Lor, up in the east where the river was narrower. His commanding officer sent them across on riverships the moment the ice melted, counting on Saren to be weakened from a difficult winter.

They had forgotten that the Hasi were still in the south, and that they were not inexperienced with Kressosi raids. While the Sarenn city had bunkered down and sheltered the women and children, the Hasi and other Sarenn men drove the mammoth herd into a panic down to the river, where they crushed ships and men alike. Kressosi muskets couldn’t harm them enough to do anything but make the panic worse, and enrage the mammoths.

“I jumped ship and swam back to shore,” Todd said, “current took me nearly a mile downriver and I had to walk back on a broken leg, with bodies floating down the river.” He shuddered slightly at the memory, and I squeezed his hand.

“The Litira Hasi say that in the old days, when it came time for war, their men would use a secret ritual to communicate with solitary males, become one with them, and take them into battle.” I had used to love listening to Hasi stories, but that one especially. I imagined the Litira warriors, with blue and red whorls painted on their faces, going into battle with mammoths, throwing spears and firing arrows from their backs.

“Well,” Todd said, “I hope for our sakes they’ve forgotten how to do that.” 

#

Muras was bent over a letter to his twin sister on a night we stayed in a roadside tavern with a leaky roof and the wind whistling around the window panes. In Kressos they say twins are lucky, signs of good fortune. Tomlin was the only of his sisters that I had ever known him to write to.

“Are you going to eat?” I asked. “I didn’t see you in the dining hall at all, and they’ll be putting the food away, soon.”

He had grown moody, and that worried me. Kaspar had been given to moods, too, and they had usually been accompanied by whiskey. Muras was not a drinker, but I did not know what he was, when a mood took him.  

Muras looked up, surprised, as if he had forgotten where we were, what time it was. “Oh—gods. Is it any good?”

“The food? It’s as good as you’ll get, this far away from anything. Suffers for a lack of pepper or ginger, but the meat’s good and the rice is cooked well.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “Go eat. Your letter will still be here when you get back.”

He went, and I sighed, glancing down at the letter.

I would say I didn’t mean to pry, but the truth was I hoped to learn if something was wrong, something he might confide to his twin but not to me.

And I saw my own name.

Lya doesn’t speak the whole of it. She answers my questions, but I always have the sense she’s holding back, concealing something. She claims she dislikes to speak of her past, but I think she’s deflecting me, that whatever she’s hiding, she has good reason to fear.

She hasn’t been the same since we crossed the Lor. It’s as if some spell has been cast over her. I can hear you telling me not to be so superstitious already, but this place, Tomlin—it’s enough to make you believe that everything the Sarenn say is true.

After a year in Morhall, I imagine I’ll be convinced of witches and trolls, too.

I scanned the rest of the letter for my name, but didn’t see it. Hands shaking, I tore myself away.

My bag sat on the end of the bed. I plunged my hand inside, seeking out the horn Weta had given me. It was cool to the touch, the old ivory yellowed with age. I ran my fingertip along the trumpet, the ivory wolf’s teeth. The pad of my finger caught a sharp edge, and I gasped softly, seeing a spot of blood smeared across the tooth.

The horn warmed in my hand, and I plunged it once more into the bag, my heart racing. Weta had not told me what would happen if I sounded the horn. All I knew was that it had been given to him by the Wolf, to give to me. “It was made, for one such as you.”

“Was this fated?”

Weta had laughed at me then. “Fated? No. You were chosen when you proved yourself, and that has made your fate.”

What it was I had done to prove myself, he hadn’t said, but I suspected I knew.

After a moment, I pulled the horn out again. It was warm now, as warm as my own skin, and the streak of blood was gone. It seemed different somehow, as if the wolf’s head at the trumpet met my gaze. Hesitantly, I pressed my lips to the bit, held it aloft.

Horns weren’t a woman’s tool. They were things of hunting, battle. I hadn’t even played with them as a child.

I lowered the horn, and gazed at it. Weta might as well have given me a sword, for all I felt capable of wielding it.

By the time Todd came upstairs, I was penning my own letter, the horn hidden safely once more. “Who’re you writing to?” Todd asked, rummaging through his bag for his nightshirt.

“Kaspar Heita,” I said. “I want to know how my son is doing.” I avoided writing Kaspar, if I could help it, but I loathed the idea of learning about Kip’s wellbeing secondhand, so every few months I sat down to pen a short letter, telling Kaspar I was well, and asking after his health, and Kip’s.

Concerning himself, he only ever said that he was managing, and then he would go on to detail everything about Kip that had happened since the last time I wrote. Every complaint, illness, joy and sorrow. Overall, he was a healthy, happy boy, and I always felt that—without saying so directly—Kaspar was hoping that it would be enough to bring me back.

At least writing him gave me something to think about other than the fact that Muras suspected me of keeping secrets and acting strangely.

“So what’s happened that you and the Tyna woman aren’t trying to actively tear each other’s throats out?” Todd asked, pulling his nightshirt over his head.

“You noticed?” I asked dryly.

“Surprised you haven’t let Bili trample her,” Todd said, sitting on the end of the bed. It was barely wide enough for two people to sleep comfortably, and I couldn’t imagine the three of us were going to be anything but cramped.

“She’s the only physician we have,” I said.

“Are you ill?” Todd asked, a note of worry in his voice.

“No,” I said. “Only pregnant.”

Todd went quiet for a moment, and I glanced at him with a smile. He laughed. “Muras will be over the moon.”

“Don’t tell him yet,” I said. “He’ll fuss terribly about Bili and I won’t be able to stand it. He’d have me going all the way to Morhall in the back of a cart with dozens of pillows.”

Todd laughed, and nodded. “Alright. I won’t say anything. Save it for when he needs cheering up, yeah?” He winked at me, and stretched out on the bed. I finished my letter and went to join him, curling up against his side.

“His family will never accept one of my children,” I murmured.

“They don’t have to,” Todd said, running his fingers over my hair. “Muras is the heir. Only acceptance that matters is his.”

#

When first I had joined Muras’ household, Todd had been wary of me. Less because I was Sarenn, and more because I had been a maidservant, abandoned a child and former lover, and he suspected me of aiming to pursue a higher social status through whatever means necessary. He warned me that it was impossible Muras would ever marry me, to which I replied rather coldly that I never again would be any man’s wife, no matter who he was.

I think it was that that allowed Todd to begin to trust me.

It was some months later before he told me why he knew Muras would never ask me to be his wife, even if he wished to.

Muras was his father’s only son, that I knew. His youngest child, born after even his twin, smaller and weaker than his sister. It was feared he would perish in his infancy, but he lived, and despite some illness when he was young, grew to thrive.

He had six elder sisters, besides Tomlin, and was close to none of them. The reason, Todd told me, was because their mother had turned her daughters against Muras and Tomlin—because they were the children of a kitchen maid.

By no means were the newly born twins the only children that resulted from Master Emiran’s indiscretions, but Muras was the only son who survived his first five years, and thus, was the only one legitimized with his father’s name. Because of that, Tomlin and Muras were resented by their half-sisters, those legitimate and those not, and Muras had spent a large part of his life seeking his father’s continued approval, with a few major exceptions.

The first, that he had joined the king’s army without his father’s consent. Master Emiran did not feel he could risk his only son, not when bloody conflict with Saren was as certain a fact as the sun in the sky. Muras felt he could not bear to live another year under the watchful gaze of everyone in that household.

The second was me.

My existence was tolerated because I was only a mistress, and a man with a mistress could still make a marriage that suited his status. If Muras sought to marry me, there would be scandal, and it was unlikely that his father hated his sons-in-law so much he would not disinherit Muras for taking a Sarenn woman of unclear standing to wife. For all anyone else in Muras’ family knew, I could have been born and raised in a brothel.

I took comfort in that knowledge. I had told the truth when I said I would never again marry. I had found marriage to be a prison through which there was only one sure escape, and it was not a position I would willingly place myself in again.

So long as Muras had no legal power over me, I could convince myself that I was a free woman.

#

One of the soldiers in our party was a young man named Keris, who blushed whenever I spoke to him. He was maybe twenty, and spoke easily enough to the men, even to Lady Tyna, but with me he grew shy and bashful.

It might have been charming, had I not been trying to ask him a question. “Master Keris, I am just trying to ask you when the traders saw the Hasi.”

“Sorry—sorry, Miss, they said it was—ah—a week ago.” He had turned pink as a rose, and finally having gotten what I wanted out of him, I spared him the continued torment of my presence, pulling myself up into the saddle and spurring Bili to the head of our little band. We had had little trouble yet—a cartwheel had broken and we spent the better part of a day affixing the new one—but the further north we went, the more anxious I grew.

Even when Saren was ruled by its own king, the north had been more feral than the south. It was a nest for thieves and highwaymen.

The sooner we joined up with a Hasi clan, the better.

Lady Tyna approached me on foot, staying well clear of Bili’s head. _“Did you hear the rumors, too?”_

I nodded. The traders we had camped with the night previous had only narrowly escaped a band of men calling themselves a militia, who had taken it upon themselves to attempt to liberate the trade caravan of its food and elk. We had soldiers, but we were a smaller party, and I was not eager to find out how confident this militia was in their ability to fight Kressosi soldiers. I would stick closer to the group, and trust that Bili was suspicious enough to alert me of anything he heard.

_“I hope your wolf-magic is good for something,”_ Lady Tyna said.

So did I.

I touched my saddlebag, where the horn was hidden. I had grown paranoid of it being too far out of my reach, though I couldn’t have said what I thought I needed it for, or how it might help me.

It would be three days, before we again encountered a tavern. The soldiers feared the animals we might encounter. They would be wiser to fear the men.

I draped the wolf pelt across my saddle. The warmth of the sun almost made it feel alive, sometimes. I had taken to bringing it to bed, and if either Todd or Muras thought that strange, they didn’t say so to me. I felt safer with it.

That day the most exciting incident occurred when we came upon a herd of wild woolly rhino grazing in a meadow, and we had to make a wide half circle around them before we could rejoin the road. There were calves whose heads only barely cleared the top of the grass, playing on a stream bank, and a flock of cranes on the shore with them.

We camped on the leeward side of a hill, under the cover of aged cedars, and set off again early in the morning, crossing paths only with a small herd of deer, and several flocks of geese. At noon we stopped to rest and water the animals, eating dried meat, cheese, and wild berries as a supper.

We passed through a small canyon speckled with thin waterfalls that would be dry by the height of summer. Moss and lichen clung to the smooth stone, dripping water onto the narrow path as we made our way down to follow the creek until the road began again.

I felt, more than saw, the way Bili tensed. He came to a full stop on the path, halting our caravan. I held up a hand to keep anyone from calling out a question, watching the way Bili’s ears flicked, the snort he gave. I raised my gaze, scanning the brush that clung to the canyon walls.

It was the glint of a bayonet that caught my eye. I yanked Bili around, raising my hand to point, “Up there—!”

The shot missed me, musketball splintering the bark of a scraggly tree just to the left, and Bili tossed his head and reared, bugling. Muras shouted to the soldiers, and I wrapped Bili’s reins around one hand, turning back to face the men aiming down at us. I felt another shot graze my cheek with a sharp sting, and I kicked my heels into Bili’s flanks, hard.

There is a reason I prefer elk to horses. Bili leapt from the path onto the treacherous footing of the hillside, barreling to the men who had fired at us, to either trample or throw them. The men scrambled for higher ground, and Bili chased until he could chase them no further, bugling and shaking his head.

I reached back into my saddle bag, grasping the one thing that was still warm to the touch. There were more men, I knew there were, because there were no three men in all of Saren mad enough to try and attack a group of Kressosi soldiers without aid. I put the horn to my lips, and the sound it made wasn’t that of any horn.

It was a wolf’s howl, echoing off the walls of the canyon.

I lowered the horn, and heard my howl answered. A dozen or more wolves I could not see, howling from the hillsides. I looked at the men Bili had chased onto a crag, and called out to them. _“Tell whoever leads you that the Winter Wolf will devour any man who harms a member of our party.”_

One of them spat at me, called me ‘witch’ and other things less polite.

I answered, raising the wolf pelt high so that they could see it. _“Tell whoever leads you that the woman who told you this is one who has spoken Vull’s name aloud, called him down from the ice, and lived to speak of it. Tell them that she made the wolves howl for her, tell them that she knows your gods by name, and that in warning you to flee she offered you a chance to save your own lives.”_ I stared at them, eyes burning. Let them think I was laying the evil eye upon them. _“Vull will slaughter any who harms me and mine.”_

A distant man’s voice called them to retreat, and I watched the men begin to climb, disappearing once more into the brush.

Snorting in discontent, Bili took us back down to the path. I held the horn tightly in my hand, and looked up, when Muras came to meet me. There was something in his eyes, something between fear and disbelief. “Lya…”

“We need to go,” I said. “Now. And get onto safer ground as quickly as we can. I won’t have scared them off for long.” I put the leather strap of the horn over my head, pulled my braid out so that it rested firmly at the back of my neck, and the horn fell against the front of my jacket. I spurred Bili to a trot, keeping an eye on the hillside, and trying to ignore the pounding in my ribs.

There were still wolves howling.

#

Muras said very little to me as we set up camp that evening, against the shelter of a shallow cave. He posted men to keep watch, and I set myself to building a fire with Lady Tyna, trying not to run my thoughts into the ground.

Lady Tyna was watching me, out the corner of her eye. _“Where did you get that horn?”_

_“Where do you think?”_ I looked at her, feeling the warmth of the horn where it was leaned up against my shirt.

Lady Tyna gazed at me for a long moment, and then looked back to our fledgling fire, carefully prodding the dry moss under the cone of kindling and firewood. _“Your man is afraid of you.”_

I didn’t answer her, rising to my feet and brushing the dirt from my skirts. Muras was standing by the mouth of the cave, watching the forest. He had his arms folded, a grim set to his mouth. I stepped up alongside him, and he spoke without looking at me. “Teffan says there’s been a pack of wolves keeping pace with us since we left the canyon. Peeled away only an hour or so ago, to hunt, he thinks.”

Was I supposed to say something to that?

Muras shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Teffan also says you may have saved our lives. Found evidence of somewhere near twenty men who had been waiting for us.” He looked at me then, pale grey eyes searching out some kind of answer in my face. “What happened in that canyon, Lya?”

I looked away. “I made them afraid to harm us, that’s all.”

“I’ve never seen that horn before. Where did you get it?”

“From an old man in Wetasur. He gave it to me as a gift.”

“A horn that summons wolves.”

“Is that what you believe it does?” I looked at him. Muras feared his nightmares, on some level I believe he feared ghosts, but like all Kressosi men of a certain kind he was loathe to admit any belief in what could not be seen, felt, or otherwise verified.

Muras muttered a curse under his breath. “What I know is that horn made a sound like a wolf’s howl, and it was answered. What I know is that ever since we crossed the Lor, everything to do with you has somehow come back to wolves. What I believe is that you’re keeping something secret from me.”

My heart shuddered against my ribs. “What I know to be true is nothing you would believe,” I said.

“Tell me anyway,” Muras said. “Because I need some explanation, Lya, anything.”

I brought the horn up in my hands. “Do you know what a vulgasgeld is?”

Muras let out a breath. “Wolf’s price. That’s what the Sarenn call frostbite, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yes. But the word comes from something else.” I looked up at him. “When you ask a favor of the Winter Wolf, you owe him something in return. A price of flesh and blood. Your own, mind, the stories are very clear about that. Sacrifice of another is not payment.” It was why what had happened at Morhall took me by surprise, why I grieved over it so. That wasn’t what I had asked for, it wasn’t what I wanted to pay for.

Muras gazed at me, waiting to see how this was an explanation. “I asked the Wolf to kill my husband,” I said. “I was ready to pay for that with my life. It didn’t matter to me, then, if I lived or died. I wanted him dead, and I wanted his other wives to be free.”

“So you owe a debt,” Muras said.

I nodded. “But I don’t think the Wolf wants my life. Not in that way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“He…” I looked down at the horn, tightened my grip on it. “He wants me to do something. I don’t know what, yet, but I don’t think I can refuse.” I shook my head, and met his gaze. “You know I’d never do anything to hurt you, don’t you?” I asked, softly. Whatever he was, whatever he had or hadn’t done, I didn’t want Muras to come to harm.

“And if that was what your god wanted you to do?” Muras asked.

I swallowed past the sudden pain in my chest. “I would pay my price some other way,” I said. Then, “If that were what he wanted, why would he have waited this long?”

Muras didn’t answer me, looking back to the forest.

I started to turn away, and then stopped. “I’m pregnant,” I said. “Todd already knows.”

Muras turned sharply, surprise on his face. “What?”

“Lady Tyna confirmed it. You’ll be a father by spring.”

I started to turn again and Muras caught my arm, gentle. “Lya,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

All I said was, “I love you.” 

#

I dreamed again, that night, with the wolf pelt on my bedroll, coarse and warm. I saw myself from a strange angle, as if it were not me, and it wasn’t me. Me in the bed had long black hair, a hazelnut face. Me in the dream had all white hair, all over, thick and coarse. Me in the dream moved on all fours, slipping like a shadow past the two men standing watch, not sure how they didn’t see me, not caring.

Things smelled different, in the dream. Sharper. I padded through the trees, silent as a ghost, stopping only when I heard the howls of my family.

I howled back, a low mournful sound that hummed out of my ribs, and went to meet them. There, my brother, grey as ash, my sister, the same, another sister, black as night. I was long missing kin, I was welcomed. I smelled blood on their breaths, deer’s blood.

Somehow, a thought was passed between us. We had other things to hunt.

We followed the smell of men on foot, men who were hungry and angry. Their camp was easy to find, they had been there a long time, and the smell of a latrine carries on the wind. They had men awake, too, but only a few of them were keeping watch.

The others were arguing. Men’s fear and anger puts a certain smell on the air, sharp and sour.  

One of the men, not the oldest, but one of the older ones, silenced the group. He had a thick, rust-red beard, and a braid that hung down to his belt, tied in silver wire. “Tell me again, what she said.”

Someone repeated the words that me-in-the-bed had said, the warning. They avoided saying the true name, they said, _the Wolf_ , and there was fear in it. The red-bearded man stoked the fire. “She is bold,” he said. “Or stupid.”

“The wolves answered her.”

“They answered a howl,” red-beard said. “That means nothing.”

“You weren’t looking at her eyes.” It was one of the men me-in-the-bed had stared down. “They weren’t a woman’s eyes.”

My brothers and sisters moved silently around the camp. They were waiting for something.

I slipped forward through the brush, and stepped into the firelight. The men saw me and flinched back, readying their muskets and rifles. Stolen, I knew somehow. All except red-beard, who told the men not to shoot, not yet. I stood on the opposite side of the fire, gazed at him. Red-beard put his elbow across his knee, cracked half a smile. “And are you the Wolf himself, or the witch my men saw?”

I growled. I was no witch.

“I ought to let my men kill you,” red-beard said.

I made no sound. Me-in-the-wolf-skin could not die, because the wolf whose shape I walked in was already dead. I sat, and gazed.

“Do you know what we are?” red-beard asked.

Thieves. Highwaymen. _Militia._ I didn’t care.

“We,” red-beard said, “are part of a Sarenn rebellion. We are going to slaughter every single Kressosi dog who stands in our way, until there is a Sarenn on the throne once more.” His eyes were blue, and sharp. “So we are given to wonder why it is one who claims to be protected by the Wolf would protect Kressosi.”

I spoke, then, with a voice that was not my own. It was a voice in the wind, in the trees. _Saren will have no king._

“Oh?” Red-beard asked. “And what will she have instead? A witch-queen, maybe?”

Weta had asked me what I would have, and I still did not know, but I knew as surely as I breathed that as long as I played a role in the Wolf’s plans, there would be no Sarenn king, no Sarenn throne. We would not be free as long as we looked behind us, instead of forward.

I stood again, growled. _Saren will have no king, and you will not harm us._

“Why shouldn’t I?” red-beard asked mildly.

My brothers and sisters began to emerge, eyes flickering at the edges of the firelight. The men’s fear-sweat was even sharper now.

_Because they will kill you,_ I said. I gazed at him one last time, and I turned my back to leave the men’s camp.

I woke when Muras gave a sudden start, woken by a nightmare of his own. In the sudden dark of the cave I blinked, and rolled over, reaching out a hand to touch his arm. He shook his head, and pulled me closer, as if he needed to be assured I was still real. In a moment we were both asleep again, and I dreamed no more that night. 

#

There was a gloomy air over the little village we came to, just after the middle of the day. I heard mourners weeping, and there were men on the edge of the village, busy building a burial mound.

Todd asked someone what had happened as we settled into the inn. He came up to our room with a grave face, and cast a meaningful glance at me. “Innkeeper’s wife says eighteen men in a hunting party were killed by wolves last night.”


	6. Wolf Sister

_“Eighteen men, all at once… I’ve never heard of wolves doing anything like that, except in stories.”_

It was all the women in the cedar bathhouse could talk about. I kept my eyes down, running hot water through my hair, combing out the tangles.

Lady Tyna had asked me only one question as we walked to the baths, quietly, and in Kressosi. “Did you have something to do with this?”

“I… I don’t know.” I had all but forgotten the dream until we reached the village, and in the dream, I hadn’t felt like quite myself. I hadn’t even thought, when I said “they will kill you” that it had been anything more than a warning, a consequence they would meet if they attempted to harm us. I didn’t know if that absolved me.

_“Best not to linger too long in the hot water,”_ Lady Tyna murmured. She handed me my linen towel, and I pulled myself out of the bath, too aware of the other women’s talk.

_“Poor Beldi… he was only what, twenty-three?”_

Lady Tyna handed me something else, pulling it from the pocket of her apron when we had dressed. A slim bottle of dark brown glass, no longer than my smallest finger.

“What is this?” I asked.

“A tincture for dreamless sleep,” she said. “Just a few drops before bed, if you feel the need.” She shrugged her shoulders, glanced away.

“I didn’t say anything about dreams,” I said.

“You didn’t need to.” She shrugged on her jacket, looked skyward and let out a breath. “You have any place to go, if your man turns you out?”

I wanted to snap that Muras would never turn me out, but I knew better. A man might have no legal power over his mistress, but he had no legal obligation, either. All this could prove too much for Muras, for Todd—and gods only knew what would happen to me then. “Jasos,” I said, wondering if the Wolf would even let me go back to Kressos, if something happened before I had paid my price. “My son is there.”

My heart ached, thinking of Kip. If I died here…

Lady Tyna gave a crisp nod. “I see.” She paused, and finally looked at me. “If ever you need a place to go,” she said. “There’s a port city in Azira—Ekhum—and up on the hill is a big house, blue, walls growing over with flowers. Ask for Basim Umad.”

“And who is Master Umad?” I asked.

Lady Tyna gave me a wry smile. “He used to be my husband.”

#

She told me the story as we walked. We stopped under the narrow tent cover of a woman selling chilled cider, and stood under the shade of an old maple.

She truly was a Tyna, as she told it, though not one that would have been able to make a terribly impressive marriage for herself. Her father was killed by Kressosi before she was born, her mother died a few days after birthing her. “Afterbirth didn’t come out whole,” she said, as if she were speaking of something hypothetical. “She took an infection. Only lived long enough to name me after the river my father died in.”

Her grandfather provided for her until she was five, at which point she was apprenticed to an herbalist and midwife. “Couldn’t afford to feed me if I wasn’t going to pay my weight in brideprice when I was older,” she said, without any bitterness in her voice. “He supposed it would be better for everyone if I had a trade.”

She stayed there until she was seventeen, learning how to use the plants, how to deliver babies. She spoke fondly of the woman—Alvild—who she described as being both as patient as a draft horse and as ornery as a mule. “I was a wasp in her hair, gods bless her.”

Then, she met Basim Umad. He was traveling with his employer, a rather prosperous man who traded a number of luxuries for Sarenn pelts and ivory. Basim was, officially, his physician. Unofficially, he was what the Azirans call a poisoner. He specialized both in protecting his employer, and in dispatching those who got in the way.

He was maybe near thirty, when she met him. Basim’s employer was meeting with a merchant, and that merchant’s wife had just delivered a daughter a few hours before. Lady Tyna and Alvild were still there, keeping an eye on mother and child. “Basim made a nuisance of himself,” Tyna said. “Decided to test the limits of my knowledge, and I was tempted to tackle him to the floor and shove some hemlock down his throat.”

Instead, she decided to go to Azira, and seek training. She knew it would make her valuable, make her more than a village healer. “It wouldn’t have been proper for an unmarried woman to travel alone with all those men, of course,” she told me, rolling her eyes, “so Basim and I married, and slept in separate beds. As long as I knew him, I never saw him show interest in anyone, that way.”

They became friends, she said, by the time they reached Azira. I heard the first note of wistfulness in her voice, when she spoke of Ekhum. “It’s a beautiful city. It climbs over the hillsides leading down to the bay, smooth stone buildings stacked on top of each other, painted and tiled in beautiful designs that could make you dizzy looking at them. Gardens, everywhere…” She sighed, and told me how she divorced Basim in Ekhum, once she had been accepted into the university, and he made no fuss over it.

She had first been tasked with learning to read and write in Aziran, and once her skills were determined sufficient, her medical training began. “Near ten years I spent in that university,” she said, “I trained, and I worked, and when it was over, I stayed in Ekhum. Basim took it upon himself to train me as a poisoner, and for a while that was what I did. It’s valuable work, in Azira. Then I heard about the war.” She was quiet for a moment. “It had been over for months, when I heard. Corasin dead, the Forset line obliterated… that was when I decided to leave Ekhum.”

“And you went to Kressos?” I asked. “Why?”

She went on as if she hadn’t heard me. “I was a novelty, in Kressos. It didn’t take long for the prince to hear about me. When I told him about my skills, he was more seriously interested in my services.” Her smile lacked any amusement. “And now,” she said, lightly, “I imagine there are few people in the world Prince Andon trusts more than me.”

_More fool him,_ I thought, looking at her. I wondered what the Kressosi prince had that she wanted.

“Trusts me enough he even turns a blind eye to how much time I spend with his wife,” she tacked on, in time to watch me choke on the last of my cider. That made her laugh, then. The first time I had heard her laugh. “Your face,” she managed to get out, pressing the back of her hand to her smile.

I mutter a curse when I could breathe again. “You aren’t serious,” I said.

“Oh, I’m perfectly serious,” Lady Tyna said. “I imagine Arabel enjoys my company more than she enjoys his.”

I couldn’t help but giggle, shaking my head. “Gods above,” I murmured.

“And you?” Lady Tyna asked. “How did you come to be Commander Emiran’s woman?”

I hesitated, wondered if she had told me her story to get mine. Wondered what she suspected me of.

“I was married once,” I said. “He was a good father but a cold husband. Wasted my chance to divorce him, I was so afraid of him.” I clutched the empty cider cup to keep my hands from trembling. “He was killed by Kressosi soldiers in the war, and I didn’t stay to bury him. Too eager to get away. Joined up with a Hasi clan for the winter, and in the spring I crossed into Kressos. Supposed there wasn’t anything left for me, in Saren. I worked as a maidservant, made my way to Jasos, had another child... that’s where I met Muras.”

Lady Tyna made a ‘hmm’ noise, her eyes searching out something in my face. She handed our cups back to the cider woman, who plunged them into a pot of boiling water so as to clean them. Then Tyna looped her arm through mine, as if we were old confidants, and walked with me down the road, the summer sun on our backs. “He doesn’t know who you are, does he?” she asked.

I looked askance at her. “What do you mean?”

In very soft Sarenn, she said, _“I met Benwulf Anarin, before I went to Ekhum. If you think I can’t recognize your uncle’s face in yours, you’ve vastly underestimated both my memory and your resemblance.”_

An icicle formed around my spine. _“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”_

_“Of course you don’t. I’m sure you thought it was very clever, telling Emiran you were a wool merchant’s daughter from Arborhall. Why should he even think to look twice at the story of a Sarenn maidservant?”_ Her tone was casual, relaxed. _“But I’m given to wonder why the only woman who escaped Morhall would stay hiding this long. Why she wouldn’t go back to her family.”_ Her green eyes slid round to meet mine. _“You said you had had a second child in Jasos. I suppose the first must have been in Saren.”_

I dug my fingers tight into her arm, nails deep in her sleeve. The only hint she gave of pain was the tightening in her jaw. _“What do you want?”_ I asked, my voice as calm as I could make it.

She didn’t hurry to answer. _“Every year that a Kressosi king rules Saren is a year that Sarenn folk get a little more accustomed to having a rope around their necks.”_

_“My son is not your bid to freedom,”_ I hissed, and cursed myself.

Lady Tyna’s eyes widened slightly. A son. A male heir. The only direct male heir Corasin had left behind.

A prince. A _king._

_“I don’t even know if he still lives,”_ I said, _“I gave him up to another mother, and I haven’t seen or heard word of him since. And if he does live, I would sooner rip your heart out with my bare hands than let you endanger his life.”_

_“Bold words,”_ Lady Tyna said.

_“Says the woman who believes I killed eighteen men in a dream,”_ I replied. My fingernails were still sunk in her arm. _“Even an Aziran poisoner couldn’t have trained you for that.”_

_“You would keep Saren subjugated.”_

_“No,”_ I said fiercely, _“I would free it from kings.”_

She looked at me carefully, a question in her eyes.

_“What makes you think I want my son to be anything like the man who sired him?”_ I asked. _“What makes you think I want anyone in this gods-forsaken country to turn a seven-year-old child into a symbol of their freedom?”_

_“What else do you think will unite Saren enough for them to break free?”_ She hissed between her teeth. _“What do you suppose they should do? Or are you that comfortable with what you see here?”_

I tightened my grip, and felt more than heard the way her breath hissed in pain. _“I think that they will have to realize that it was never kings that made Saren what it is.”_

#

There had been a thunderstorm, a few nights before Veland was born. The wind had howled around Pitalani’s house, tearing at the mammoth hide. I remember sitting close to the fire, my hands on my belly, imagining the Wolf’s howl in the wind. I thought on my mother, how when thunderstorms frightened me as a child, she would smooth my hair and tell me it was only Thraldi, battling the Wolf and his pack. Lightning was the sparks from her hammer, thunder the sound of the blows.

That night, I had prayed to Thraldi to protect us.

Pitalani looked at me from across the fire, her dark eyes shining. Her girl was sleeping, her husband and brother talking in low voices. “You won’t stay, will you?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “I can’t.”

“A wolf needs a pack,” she said.

“I am not a wolf.”

“Are you sure?”

I didn’t answer her, at first. I only stared into the coals, and held onto the swell in my middle, trying to soothe the baby’s kicking. I felt in my bones that he would be born soon. “I’ll come back for him someday,” I said. “I will.”

Pitalani nodded. “We will be waiting for you.”

#

I threw out Tyna’s tincture, and slept restlessly.

I didn’t believe she would tell anyone who I was. Not yet, anyway. Not until she had figured out how to advance her goals by doing it. I was faced, then, by two equally troubling conclusions.

Either Tyna truly wanted to free Saren from Kressosi rule, and would do whatever she could to reach that end, or she was playing out some scheme for Prince Andon to ensure that there was never any threat to Kressos from Corasin’s line.

And I had told her about my son.

Morning couldn’t come soon enough. I washed my face at a pump behind the inn, in the barest light of dawn. It was cold, and that eased some of the exhaustion. The innkeeper brewed a strong tea that was bitter even with goat’s milk and honey but served to wake me a little further, enough so that I had an appetite for the fry bread with butter, goat sausage, and pickled apples.

I went out to the stables to brush Bili down and get him ready to travel. I couldn’t wait to be rid of this place.

Bili disliked being shut up in a stable, and he let me know by catching my sleeve between his teeth and yanking. I made a fist with my hand and knocked him in the nose. Not hard, just enough to surprise him and make him let go. He shook his head, offended.

“Mind your manners, then,” I said. I brushed him down and checked his hooves, swatting his side whenever he decided to be testy. I had no patience for him, just then.

“I wish you would have picked a gentler beast.”

I glanced at Muras over Bili’s back. He stood with his arms folded over the door, watching. “I know you do.” Impossible as he was, I liked Bili. The fact that he respected me, at least to some degree, and only me, had done quite a bit to restore my pride. I was still the rider I had been at seventeen. An elk was a Sarenn beast, nimbler and fiercer than any Kressosi horse.

Muras shifted from foot to foot, not flinching when Bili tried to escape my grasp and kick the door. “Does he have something to do with… whatever it is your mission here is supposed to be?”

I ran a hand down the back of Bili’s neck, smoothing the coarse hair. “I don’t think so. I just like him.” Bili turned and snorted in my face. I rolled my eyes and wiped my cheek with my sleeve. “Against my better judgment.”

Muras laughed softly, which put me a little more at ease.

“Muras,” I said, moving over to the door. Bili followed me, attempting to chew on the end of my braid before I pulled it over my shoulder. “There’s something… there’s something I need to tell you.”

He gazed at me, and I couldn’t tell what he thought I was going to say.

“My son may be among the Atsa Hasi, when we catch up to them,” I said. “The Kiruk clan travels through these parts, sometimes…” I didn’t know where I was going with this, and I didn’t want to babble, so I fell quiet. Every time I thought on Veland, I wondered what he looked like. If he was happy. If Pitalani really was waiting for me, as she had said she would.

“Do you want him to come with us?” Muras asked.

I blinked. “What?”

“If he is there,” Muras said, “do you want to bring him with us?”

He was seven years old, now. If he knew I existed at all, he only new me by the name the Kiruk Atsa had given me. Pitalani was more his mother than I was. “I… I don’t know.” I glanced away. “I won’t know until I see him.”

Having him with me would bring him closer to all the dangers that being my son would mean. But if he was there, and Lady Tyna knew he was there, and he wasn’t with me, I wouldn’t be able to protect him.

A voice in the dark parts of my mind asked why I thought I could protect him better than Pitalani’s family. Why I thought Veland would be any safer with me for a mother.

Muras reached over, touched my cheek. “You know I would have welcomed Kip, too.”

I leaned my face into his touch. His hands were always warm. “I know. But I couldn’t take him from Kaspar. Not like that.” I couldn’t have done that to Kip, no matter how much I wanted to hold him fast. Muras’ reputation might have been able to withstand raising another man’s half-Sarenn bastard, but a child didn’t deserve that shame. I would let Kip grow up with his father, and I would keep my pain to myself.

It was something I did well.

Bili rudely stuck his head over my shoulder, nipping at Muras’ hand, and I threw an elbow back into the surly elk’s chest. “Ought to turn you into sausage, you miserable bastard,” I muttered as Bili drew back, huffing.

#

If you are near to a camped Hasi clan, you can find them by sound, often as not. Under the sound of mammoths calling to one another, you are likely to hear human chatter, the bustle of work, and singing.

It was a large camp we came upon, two or three clans whose herds had begun to join up for their summer grazing. By the height of summer the herds would have come together to graze and breed until the beginning of fall, and in that time all the various Hasi peoples would trade with each other, share news, make marriages, and do all the work necessary to prepare for the migration south for the winter, and begin the cycle anew.

You can tell the Atsa by the designs painted on the mammoth hides of their homes—sharp and geometric, in blues, yellows, and reds. There were other tents, too, of Sarenn traders on their way north, looking for the same safety in numbers we were seeking. Their woolly rhinos grazed nearby, kicking up dust and shaking off flies.

Camped as they were in the vast meadow, we were spotted well before we drew near enough to the camp to call out to them. The mammoths announced our presence, their trumpeting drawing the attention of the Hasi.

Muras rode to my left, in uniform, and I saw some of those watching our arrival grow wary and anxious. I drew in a breath, pulling Bili to a stop when we were about fifty paces from the camp. I dismounted and walked forward, bowing my head slightly to indicate peaceful intentions.

I was going to ask after clan elders, to express our desire to join their company for a time, when I saw someone hurrying toward me through the camp. It took me a moment to recognize her, but I knew when she cried the only name she knew me by— _“Wolf Sister!”_

Pitalani clasped my face in both her hands and kissed my forehead and both my cheeks. She smiled and in Trader’s Tongue said, _“I knew it was you when I saw that pelt.”_

The wolf pelt was across Bili’s saddle, as bright and white as the thin clouds in the sky above us. “Pitalani,” I said, starting to smile. _“It’s good to see you again.”_

Her cry had drawn the attention of her clan, and people that remembered me were moving forward through the camp. I remembered some of their names, but not as many as I would have liked. They were so busy with their hellos, asking after my health, telling me how happy they were to see me again, that I was distracted from my foremost anxiety until a boy—tall for his age, and thin in the weedy way of children who only grow taller the more you feed them—shoved his way to the forefront, and stared at me with wide, amber-brown eyes.

He was the spitting image of any of my brothers, with that high proud nose, and a softness in his face that would temper with age. The only difference was that his hair was elk-brown, not crow-black.

I felt my breath stop in my chest.

Pitalani reached for him, smiling. “Veland,” she said, although she pronounced it Way-lan, _“this is your mother.”_

_“I know.”_ His eyes never moved from my face, and I felt tears pricking at my eyes.

I sucked in a ragged breath, bringing a shaking hand to my mouth. _“Hello, Veland,”_ I whispered.

He grinned, then, a wide open smile that wrenched a knife in my chest. _“They told me you’d come back.”  
_

#

As I tried to get everyone settled in the camp, serving as interpreter between Sarenn, Hasi, and Kressosi, I was constantly aware of the small shadow I had developed. Veland hovered always nearby, a gaggle of Atsa children around him, all talking fast and loud.

“You’re a popular woman,” Todd said, smiling.

I would have said I was the last of the spring ice threatening to shatter. Seven years and here was my son, knowing who I was and excited to meet me, and Lor Tyna lurking at the edges of my mind.

I couldn’t let Veland out of my sight—though the more difficult task was not tripping over him when I turned. “Alright, lad,” Todd said, clapping a hand on Todd’s shoulder. “Let’s give your ma a better way of keeping an eye on you.” I didn’t have time to point out that Veland didn’t understand a word of what Todd was saying before he had swung Veland up onto his shoulders. Veland gave a surprised yelp, but then he grinned, hands balanced on Todd’s head.

“Just don’t drop him,” I told Todd.

“He’s not an infant, he won’t break. I’m joking, Lya,” he said when I gave him a hard look. “I’ll be careful.”

_“Veland, this is Todd,”_ I said, _“he’s a good friend of mine, you can trust him.”_

Veland nodded. _“Yes, Ima.”_

My heart constricted in my chest, and I looked away. What had Pitalani told him about me? What did she even have to tell? That the Wolf brought me from out the snow, and as soon as I birthed him I was gone without ever telling anyone my name?

I saw Lady Tyna watching us, and the wolf in me bristled and bared her teeth. Piss-poor mother I might have been, but no self-blame would make me let that woman near Veland.

Todd must have carried Veland on his shoulders for near an hour, keeping him out from under my feet, They couldn’t speak a word to each other, but they had their own way worked out soon enough. I saw Veland tapping Todd on the head with the flat of his hand and pointing when he wanted a change of direction. Todd would give a slight tug to Veland’s leg when he leaned too far one way or the other, and Veland would right himself, and they would be off again.

Muras watched them with a smile. “He looks like you,” he said.

A mercy, I thought. “I didn’t think he would know who I was.” Or that he would be so ready to call me mother. Pitalani had raised him, fed him, dressed him. All I had given him was a name, a name that he only knew as Way-lan.

Muras put a hand on my back. “How are you?” he asked, so soft an earnest it would have broken my heart if Veland hadn’t already.

I looked at him, my arms hugged across my chest. “Terrified,” I said.

He leaned over, touched his forehead to mine. “You know I’ll do everything I can to see you happy.”

I tipped my face up, brushed my lips across his. “I know.” He was a soft-hearted fool, like that. Had I ever been so devoted to someone?

I could only think I would have promised so much to Róana. I would have delivered her the stars to see her smile. I didn’t know what Muras saw in me that he kept promising me the world, even now.

That night, there was a celebration. I was sat by Pitalani, who had become an elder since I had last seen her, with Veland on my other side. We ate thimbleberries and pale-fleshed salmon and wild rice, and drank elk’s milk mixed with honey. There was quite a lot of singing, in Atsa, so I didn’t understand, but I joined in with clapping my hands, smiling at Veland when he joined in the singing.

I lost track of Muras and Todd. The focus of the celebration swirled around me and Veland, on our reunion, which apparently the Atsa had had a great deal more faith in than I had.

The ivory wolf’s head still hung on a cord around Veland’s neck. I hadn’t noticed it until then, perhaps he had been wearing it under his shirt. Now I saw it in the firelight, almost red, and I thought of the red dress I had worn when I escaped Morhall. I thought of the blood on Corasin’s shirt, across Muras’ face.

For a moment, just beyond the edge of the firelight, I thought I saw a man, tall and pale, something feral about his bearing, but when I looked up, there was nothing there.

“Ima?”

I looked back to Veland, managed a smile. _“Yes?”_

_“Are you going to stay with us?”_ He looked so hopeful.

I smiled sadly, touched his hair. _“No, puppy,”_ I whispered. _“I’m going to Morhall.”_

I watched the hurt bloom in his eyes. _“Why?”_

_“It’s why I came north. It’s…”_ I paused. _“It’s where White Wolf told me I needed to go.”_

Veland’s eyes went wide for a moment, and then he clutched my sleeve. _“Can I come with you?”_ He saw the hesitation in my face. _“Please, Ima? Pitalani says White Wolf is my eba.”_ His father. Pitalani had told him the Wolf was his father.

I looked back over my shoulder, seeking out Muras and Todd. I found them together, relaxed, Muras’ head on Todd’s chest, the both of them untroubled, at least for the moment. I saw Lady Tyna, deep in conversation with one of the Atsa elders. I looked back to Veland, his eyes pleading.

_“You know you won’t see Pitalani or anyone else for a long time, if you come with me,”_ I said. _“You will have to learn Sarenn, and Kressosi, and to read and write. Things will be very different.”_

There was a seed of doubt in his eyes for a moment, and then he shook his head, and looked only more determined. _“I want to go with you.”_

I drew him into my lap, and put my arms around him, kissing the top of his head. _“Then you will, puppy.”_ I closed my eyes, and whispered a prayer into his hair. “Vintervulgas,” I murmured, “protect him, for me.”

#

Veland fell asleep in my arms, while I sat by the dying fire with Pitalani. The celebration had died down, and I ached from sitting on the ground for so long. “Thank you,” I murmured, “for everything you’ve done for him.”

Pitalani smiled at me, a little sadly. “I always knew you would return for him. I didn’t know it would be so soon.”

I stroked Veland’s hair, long and with the braid clubbed at the back of his head in the Atsa style. My fingers caught on the cord around his neck, and I found the ivory pendant, holding it in my hand. I wondered what the men would think, when they saw that. “You told him the Wolf was his father,” I said.

Pitalani’s dark eyes glimmered in the firelight. “He asked. I had nothing else to tell him.”

“It’s better, that way.” I adjusted Veland’s elbow so that it was no longer digging into my gut. “I suppose it’s true, in its own way.” He would never have been born, if the Wolf hadn’t brought me to Pitalani.

She offered me a cup of water. “The men you are with… is one of them your husband?”

“No.” I shook my head. “But they take care of me.”

“I see.” She sipped at her own cup, and looked up at the stars. “Wuritu is married, now. He has a daughter, and another child on the way.”

Her brother, my almost-husband. I smiled a little. “I’m happy for him.” I rubbed Veland’s back. “I’ll have another child, by next spring.”

“I will be glad to see them, in the summer.” Pitalani plucked a stray bit of grass from Veland’s shirt. “He prayed for White Wolf to bring you back.” She glanced at the wolf pelt sitting beside me, and then to my eyes.

I looked away. “The Wolf must have listened. I’ve had him on my heels ever since I crossed the River Lor.” In my arms, Veland stirred, and yawned, rubbing his eyes. “He should sleep with your family, for now,” I said, “until it’s time for us to part ways.” I trusted her to keep him safe. I trusted that Lady Tyna was not so bold as to try anything in a full camp of people who considered Veland their kin. I trusted that she knew I would kill her, if she did.

Pitalani nodded, and grasped Veland’s hand, speaking softly to him in Atsa, coaxing him up to his feet. I put out the last of the fire, kicking dirt over the embers. Bone-tired and bone-sore, I searched through the dark for Muras’ tent.

He was waiting for me. He greeted me with a kiss, and touched his forehead to mine. He must have known.

“Veland says he wants to come with me,” I said.

“Well, then,” Muras murmured. “I’ll have to get to know him, won’t I?”

I tucked my face into his shoulder, let out a breath. “I’m cold,” I said.

Muras put an arm around me, and pulled me inside. “Then we’ll have to fix that.”

#

The Hasi move nowhere fast. It is a joke nearly universal among them—if the mammoth hurries, there is more to worry than keeping up with them.

It was a more leisurely pace than I had set, surrounded by military men accustomed to hard riding. Bili was in remarkably good temper, perhaps because in the evenings he was left to graze freely with a number of cows, though none of them was yet of any desire to tolerate his interests.

I rode with Pitalani, making faces at her young son strapped to her back. He giggled and hid his face in his mother’s shoulders.

“I haven’t asked you,” Pitalani said, the warm red-brown planes of her face lit by the morning sun, “that woman traveling with you. Who is she?”

“She is of a Sarenn family,” I said, “but she serves the Kressosi throne, now.”

“Hmm.” Pitalani heaved a sigh. “We have had some trouble with Kressosi men. If you had not been traveling with these ones, they would not have been received so readily.”

I had warned Muras that the men must be on their best behavior, that as their intercessor and translator I would be responsible for them. I felt that pressure triply now. “What sort of trouble have they given you?”

“They do not understand how to trade with us,” Pitalani said. “They think us primitive. They attempt to violate agreements between my folk and yours.”

Land, I supposed. That was the biggest thing. Hasi routes could not be changed by human will. The mammoths went where they had always gone, and the Hasi followed. Or hunting—the Hasi tolerated hunting of solitary males, but if anyone made an attack on a herd, it would be met with retaliation, no matter how peaceful the particular Hasi people. “I don’t know how much Muras can do,” I said, “but he is influential. I will speak to him.”

Pitalani nodded, and gave me a warm glance. “I am sorry to have lost you as a sister.”

I smiled sadly. “I fear I’m more help to you as I am.”

“Perhaps.” After a moment, she asked, “Your men. Are they a help to you?”

I wanted to tell her that they provided for me, that I was never hungry or cold, but that was not what she was asking. “They do not always understand,” I said, “but they try.”

“And Way-lan?”

“Todd loves children,” I told her, “and Muras wants a family.”

“You trust them?”

“I would not have told them about Veland, if I did not.” It was Tyna I didn’t trust, that was why I wanted Veland close to me.

I saw him, then, on the back of a yearling cow, racing one of the older boys. He was lighter, but his elk was smaller. “He’s a good rider,” I said.

“Once he could walk I could hardly keep him away from the elk,” Pitalani mused. “He talks to them. I’ve seen him cozying up to your fiery creature, with sweets in his hand.”

I cursed softly. “He’s lucky he hasn’t got his head kicked in.”

“Oh, he’ll have that bull as sweet as a puppy,” Pitalani said with a smile. “Just give him time.”


	7. Shadow

I was well attended in the Hasi camp by my gaggle of young admirers. What Veland was telling them about me I couldn’t be sure, but the children he was boasting to all seemed suitably impressed with me, and bombarded me with questions in Trader’s Tongue, while I tried to help Pitalani and the other women by washing cook pots and gathering branches and moss for fires with the young children. 

During the day I saw little of Muras or Todd, who I had encouraged to pull their weight by hunting with the Atsa men. They went out just after first light, communicating with the other men through hand signals and expression more than words. At dusk they returned tired and sore but in good spirits, even if they had shot nothing, and slept without stirring. 

Of Lady Tyna, I saw even less. She took her elk early in the mornings, and often did not return until after dark, with bundles of herbs. She dried them carefully by fire, and made her medicines in the dim orange light. She tended to weariness and headaches among our men, and once, pulled a man’s tooth, an exercise that had required four of his friends to hold him down, and a rinse to keep the wound in his gum clean until it healed. She presented the broken tooth to the whimpering soldier in the palm of her hand, rinsed clean of blood. “Keep it,” she told him, “perhaps it will remind you not to leap from the back of an elk to impress a pretty girl.”

My dozen or so shadows didn’t seem to mind my preoccupation with these things. 

I sat by the fire one night, stitching a tear in Todd’s coat, and Veland sat down at my knee, legs folded, running his thumb over the face of his ivory wolf’s head. “Ima,” he said, _“will you tell me a story?”_

I glanced at him, careful not to prick my thumb with the needle. _“What kind of story?”_

He shrugged. _“One I haven’t heard before.”_

I thought for a moment, and looked at my son. _“Have you ever heard of the hero Anar?”_

Veland shook his head. 

This was his heritage, I thought. Not the bloodied crown of a king, but wolves and hounds and pride, and a mother who would skin any who laid a hand on her son. 

_“Once,”_ I said, _“it is said that Anar stole a great treasure from the god_ Weta.”   
Veland looked confused for a moment, and I struggled to remember the Atsa name for Weta. _“Watiruk,”_ I said, and Veland’s eyes brightened. _“Anar took from Watiruk a halberd smithed by—”_ What was Thraldi’s name to the Atsa? _“—Red Bull Woman. Watiruk had used that halberd to slay the giant Haeldis—my folk say that he was a fearsome giant, who ate children who didn’t obey their mothers.”_ I gave Veland a wink, and he giggled. _“So Watiruk, naturally, was not happy that Anar took this prize.”_

_“What did Watiruk do?”_ Veland asked, his arms around his knees. 

_“He pursued Anar,”_ I said, _“but Anar was a wily creature, as wily as Watiruk himself. His hounds, Iarantan and Svartkla, harried Watiruk’s elk wherever they passed, slowing the god down._

_“Anar carried Watiruk’s halberd south, for he had a purpose in mind—to fight the strange men who had crossed the River Lor to invade the lands of his neighbors. You see,”_ I said, as if I was sharing a secret with Veland, _“the intent was not to use Watiruk’s halberd, but to force the god into action.”_

Veland gave a big, broad smile. 

_“Anar drew Watiruk down all the way to the banks of the Lor, and when the god came to claim what was his, Anar threw the halberd among the strange men, and its blade sank deep in the mud of the river._

_“Watiruk and his great green elk descended into the fray of battle.”_ I had forgotten Todd’s coat in my lap, my hands in the air to cast long shadows on the grass behind me. _“The strange men knew not what they faced, with Battle-Frenzy bearing down upon them, lending his own bloodlust to the men of Saren and strengthening them for the battle. Watiruk retrieved his halberd, and with it he cut down all in his path, filling the waters with the blood of the strange men, sending them scurrying back to their own shores with their tails between their legs!”_

Veland laughed, and something in me warmed that he did. There was more to the story, of a contest of skills between god and man where, naturally, Anar bent the rules just enough to win, and grudgingly earn Weta’s respect. I would have told it to him, but his friends descended, racing off into the rest of the camp to harry their mothers for sweets, and I was left with my mending. 

I watched him go with half a smile. There would be time to tell the full story, later. 

“I suppose you were right,” a voice said behind me. 

I glanced back over my shoulder at Lady Tyna, my hand curling around the knife Pitalani had lent me to aid in work and cooking. 

Tyna wasn’t looking at me, though. “He’s a child. And an ignorant one at that.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, warily. 

“He can barely speak a handful of sentences in Sarenn,” Tyna murmured. “Figurehead or not, he would never be accepted by the rest of the kingdom as he is.” 

“Does that ruin your plans?” I asked coolly.

She smiled a little, and finally turned her eyes to me. “Not necessarily. There’s still you.”

I turned away from her, picking up Todd’s coat once more.

“You can’t possibly be content doing stitching for two Kressosi men more enchanted with each other than you.”

“A learned woman such as yourself should know that it ill-suits her to speak of things she doesn’t understand.” I pulled the thread tight, snapping it between my teeth. “What I am content with has nothing to do with you.” 

“Doesn’t it?” Tyna sat near me, warming her hands at the fire. “You and I—by the way our stories are told, both of us ought to be dead. Yet here we are, alive and with obligations to Kressosi men.”

“Yours wants mine dead,” I said, slipping the needle carefully into my sewing case. “Why should I do anything for you?” 

“I suppose that depends on what you want.” The way she watched me, and I watched her in return, reminded me of a story my father once told me of a chance encounter between a wolf and a snow lion that he had watched while hunting as a young man. He said that they had stared at each other, silent but intensely wary of each other. They had backed away without ever taking their eyes off each other, until they were far enough away to turn, and depart. _They recognized in each other that they were the same kind of creature,_ Father said, _and yet not the same at all._

“I wonder,” Tyna said, “how you mean to free Saren from kings.” 

I said nothing, folding Todd’s coat neatly in my lap. 

“And I wonder,” Tyna said, “if you can’t see the obvious use in making alliance with a person as close to the royal family of Kressos as I am.” 

I raised my eyes to hers. The wolf staring down the snow lion. “You could have done that years ago. Why would you need me?”

“You’re your husband’s last living wife,” she said. “That must count for something.”

Last living wife. I sucked in a breath and looked away. Seven years and that guilt still made me ill. I had been marked with the shadow of death ever since Solema. 

“Think on it,” Tyna said. “We will have all winter to ponder the lives of kings.” 

#

In the early morning mist I watched Veland cozying up to Bili with a pouch full of huckleberries. He didn’t know that he was being observed, as Muras and I were careful to keep quiet. Muras had seen him doing this a few times, he had roused me this morning to see for myself. 

Bili was laying down in the grass, but alert, watching Veland with flicking ears. As Veland drew closer, Bili stood, drawing himself up to full height. Veland didn’t flinch, but extended his palm, letting Bili sniff him. Bili snorted and drew slightly away, keeping his gaze on the boy. 

Veland reached slowly into the pouch, and offered a handful of berries. Bili hesitated, and stretched out his neck, sniffing, and nibbling the berries out of Veland’s hand. Veland tried, very slowly, to reach out his other hand to touch Bili’s neck, but the bull jerked back, snorting and pacing. Veland walked backwards, keeping his eyes on Bili until the elk calmed down enough to ignore him, and begin to graze. 

“At first he couldn’t even get close to the beast,” Muras murmured. “He’s patient, though. Haven’t seen him get discouraged yet.” 

I gave a long, low whistle. Veland looked up sharply and Bili came to me at a trot. He pressed his snout under my arm, like he was rooting for sweets. I put a firm hand on Bili’s head and pushed him back, patting him on the side. 

I nodded my head to Veland, smiled. _“Let’s go for a ride.”_

I swung up across Bili’s back, not needing a saddle, and pulled Veland up in front of me, nodding to Muras. He smiled at me and nodded back, and I dug my heels into Bili’s sides. 

Bili leapt forward, and I felt Veland suck in a breath, clinging tight to the thick hair at the base of Bili’s neck. Bili galloped along the edge of the Atsa camp, and at a tug on the reins and a nudge of my knee he peeled away through the meadow, lungs pumping like a blacksmith’s bellows. Veland howled with gleeful laughter, his unbraided hair whipping back in my face. 

Bili leapt, clearing a boulder, and in that moment we were in the air I was fifteen again, on one of my father’s elk, scaring my poor mother half to death.   
Bili’s hooves struck ground again and he went for the stream, gradually slowing to a trot, and then stopping, sides heaving. Veland twisted in the saddle to look at me, face split in a wide grin. I took Bili at a walk back into camp, letting him cool down. Veland ran ahead of me, shrieking to his companions in Atsa. 

I let Bili go back to graze, patting his rump as he passed me. Muras was watching me thoughtfully.

“What?”

“You always look happiest when you’re riding,” he said. 

I watched the elk grazing. “It reminds me of my life before.”

The mammoth herd knew they were growing closer to their summer grounds, and we did not have much time that morning for eating and packing before we were off again, following the herd north. Midsummer was approaching fast, and the herd would want to make the most of those months before autumn came, and they would travel again. 

The men went hunting, and the Atsa woman sang as they rode. 

Lady Tyna fell in beside me. She did not speak, and neither did I. 

It was a quiet day, mostly. We passed through forest that was used to mammoth travel, young trees recently broken to make way for the mammoth paths, old trees standing spaced and distant. The mammoths talked among themselves, and I listened to the birds that I could not see.   
Sometimes, I saw the trolls darting between the trees. 

“What is your man going to think,” Tyna mused, “the first time he sees a troll?”

I didn’t need to tell her that neither Muras or Todd believed that trolls existed. “Perhaps it will teach him to listen more closely to my stories,” I said.

Tyna smiled. “Kressosi like to talk more than they like to listen. The men, especially.”

“I don’t find it to be a uniquely Kressosi problem.” I was quiet for a moment, listening to the mammoths. “How do you think I would be useful to what you want to achieve?” I was only the widow of a king, not a born princess. I was not even a man. 

Tyna considered my question, and I was glad she did not answer me hastily. “Whatever noble goals you have to free this place of kings, our people love a symbol and a story. I can think of few better stories, few better symbols, than the woman who survived Morhall.” She looked at me carefully. “You could unite them. The princess who returned from the halls of the dead to free her people.” 

I grimaced. “And what exactly is in it for you?”

Tyna did not smile or honeycoat her words. “Kressos destroyed my family. What do you think is in it for me?” She looked away. “I have waited because I did not want to waste my opportunity. To kill one king only for his son to replace him changes little. I have been searching for a way to break them, to ruin them the way my family was ruined. Then, I met you.”

“You want to make me a weapon.”

“Hardly,” Tyna said, outright dismissive. “I’m not the kind of fool who will put a leash on a wolf and call it a dog. I want to make you an ally.” She glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “You must want your own vengeance.”

“Vengeance is not afforded to women.”

“So they tell me,” Tyna said with a smile. “Nor are war horns, and yet it seems you already have one.” 

I let out a breath. “And what do you expect Sarenn will say, when their symbol is revealed to have shared her bed with Kressosi?”

Again, she did not answer me quickly. “I do not know,” she admitted. “But anyone who does not accept that many a Sarenn woman has had to do that to survive is a fool.”

“Foolishness is a common trait among all people.” I looked to the sky, patches of clear blue showing through the treetops. “A Sarenn symbol with a half-Kressosi child would open a thousand hornet nests.” 

“Perhaps,” Tyna allowed. “But perhaps it is only fear that keeps you where you are.”

I wanted to be angry with her, for implying I was a coward, but I could not. I was too tired for that. “I don’t have the luxury of only fearing for myself.” 

Tyna did not answer that. 

#

The day before Midsummer, we found the open plain where the Hasi spent their summers. Huge camps sprawled across those low hills, Atsa and Katuk, Horta and Massoni, Patayan and Litira, and others that I could not identify on sight. The herds mixed and intermingled, solitary bachelors making a show, and below them the people talked and traded and did what business needed to be done.

No one was pleased to see men in Kressosi uniform, and Muras kept his men to the fringes, with their rifles packed away, and entertaining themselves with games. 

I would have liked to move on immediately, to leave the Hasi camps in peace, but there was one thing I was yet obligated to do.

There is a ceremony, to returning a child to his birth mother. 

The night of Midsummer, the Kiruk clan slaughtered a young bull elk, and we all shared the meat. The hide would be tanned, and sent after us as a gift. The heart was specially roasted, for Veland and myself. It tasted almost sweet on my tongue, though maybe it was only the significance of the occasion. 

I had asked Veland that morning, if he was sure he wanted to leave with me. “I want you to be happy,” I told him, stroking his cheek. “And if you will be happier with Pitalani and the others, I want to know.”

Veland only shook his head. “I’m coming with you, Ima.”

After we had eaten, there was singing. I did not know the words, but I smiled and clapped along. 

Pitalani, Veland, and I sat at the center of the ring. Veland sat first before Pitalani, and she loosened his hair, freeing the braid from its club, and then carefully combing it out, until the long brown hair hung over his shoulders, shining in the firelight.

I brought out my own comb as Veland settled in front of me. I had considered carefully how I would braid his hair. I began at the nape of the neck, with a hair wire and beads that I myself had not worn in years. Kressosi women mocked me when I did, for putting on airs, but we were not in Kressos anymore, and I wanted to give my son something that belonged to him by birth. 

I could not give him a king’s braid, so I used the wire to thread his hair through the beads, and plaited his hair down his back, tying it off with a yellow cord and jay feathers that fluttered when he moved. I kissed the top of his head, and the family that had raised him sang for us. 

I didn’t let Veland see me cry. 

#

Veland rode in the back of my saddle as we set out for Morhall. The air was heavy with a gathering thunderstorm, and it made Bili anxious. 

I let out a breath when we crested the hill that brought us in view of Morhall. It was as imposing as I remembered, though my memories had made it larger and bleaker than it was. I was almost startled by how normal it appeared, the fields thick with the late summer crop. The people working them were still Sarenn, but now there were men who supervised them, in Kressosi uniform. 

Veland pressed tighter against my back, and I let Bili fall in with our party, no longer leading. Tyna came up alongside me, giving me a slight nod as she placed herself between me and the Kressosi soldiers. 

A group of men came to meet us. They stopped and dismounted, bowing deeply. “Commander Emiran,” the man at the forefront said. “We are honored.” 

I heard little of what was said as we approached the old castle. I felt as if horse blinders had been placed on my head, I could only look at Morhall, and my breath came shallow.

Tyna pulled her cow alongside Bili, and grasped my arm just below the elbow, hard. “Breathe, Sargis,” she murmured. “Breathe.” 

I drew in a long breath, careful to let it out slow. Tyna rummaged in her pocket for something, and held out a tiny glass vial. I recognized the smell of lavender oil, and dabbed a bit just to the sides of my nose, tucking the vial carefully into the pocket of my coat. “Thank you,” I whispered. 

The ride felt at once achingly slow and much too fast. Every fiber of muscle and bone in me screamed to turn tail and run, that this was a ghost-haunted tomb and a prison I had sworn I would never return to. 

I had to remind myself that I had chosen this. That I had laid the path and now I must walk it. The wolf pelt across my lap, the ivory wolf horn—I had been given them for a reason. I had Veland again. Now was not a time to let my fear make a coward of me. 

I could feel Veland shifting in the saddle to get a better look at the castle. I doubted the Atsa would ever have brought him this far north. Since the war, Pitalani had told me, they had done their best to avoid unnecessary encounters with Kressosi soldiers. The Sarenn who wanted to trade would come to them. 

The men who had come to greet Muras didn’t know what to make of me or Veland, and I ignored them, head high. A woman who had faced two wild gods should not cower before any man. 

A woman who had brought her country to its knees all for the hatred of one mortal man should not fear another.

Muras spoke. “Tell me about this wolf cult I’ve heard rumors of.”   
I turned to look, and the officer riding just to the other side of Muras winced at my gaze. 

“They’ve built a… a temple, I suppose, below the castle walls. Most of them live there, the outcasts of Sarenn society.” 

I frowned. “What do you mean by that?” 

The officer avoided looking directly at me. “There are accused witches, mothers of bastard children, dishonored men… those sort of people, Miss.” He paused, and spoke to Muras as if I were not there. “Commander, I must warn you that your mistress… there has been talk, in the town, about a wolf-woman or something of that nature. When they see her, with that pelt, I believe… well, I cannot say what kind of trouble there will be, sir.” 

Muras looked to me. 

“What word did they use to name the wolf woman?” I asked. 

The officer hemmed and hawed and avoided looking directly at me. “Ah… Ima Vulgas, I think it was.” 

Mother Wolf. I touched the pelt, and considered. Wolf-witch, Wolf Woman, Wolf Sister, Wolf Mother. 

I had not had strange dreams in weeks, and now I wished I had, that I might have some kind of answer for what I was about to face. 

“Ima,” Veland whispered, _“what are they talking about?”_

_“There may be trouble,”_ I said, _“hold tight to me when we reach the town.”_  
Veland pressed his cheek against my back, his skinny arms tight about my ribs. 

Tyna reached back into one of her saddlebags, and pulled out a sheathed Aziran shortsword, its hilt bound in emerald thread and the blade curved like a crescent moon. 

I stared at her. 

Tyna gave me half a smile. “It was a gift from my husband. You can’t really believe I traveled unarmed.” In Sarenn, she added, _“Not all of us can call on wolves whenever we’re in danger.”_

I shook my head and drew in a breath. 

From the outside, the town around Morhall did not seem to have changed much. Timber houses, taverns with painted signs. There, the dressmaker’s shop that had once outfitted half the ladies of the court, there, the livery, the smithy, and on the southeast edge of town the tanners and dye shops. 

It all looked as I remembered it, until we were actually within the town. Children disappeared from the streets when they saw the soldiers coming, pulling their younger siblings after them. Men and women averted their eyes, kept their heads down. No one called greetings to us. 

I spoke, before I thought, and called out to a woman who glanced away when I met her gaze. _“Sun on your head, Cousin.”_

The woman looked back up in surprise, and several other gazes followed hers. _“…Wind at your back, Cousin.”_

Tyna looked as if she could kill me. 

There were eyes on me, now, openly staring. Veland burrowed against my back, tense as a spring hare under the gaze of a hawk. Quietly, I greeted everyone who met my gaze, and they greeted me in turn, taking in my Kressosi dress, my Sarenn braid, and the wolf pelt across my lap. Whatever they believed me to be, they would be talking about me. 

Bili snorted and fidgeted so I kept a tight hand on the reins, knees pressed into his ribs. If there was one disadvantage to elk, it was that they were damnedly sensitive. Bili could tell I was anxious, and it put him on alert. 

_“Sun on your head, wind at your back.”_

I could feel Veland shifting, peering curiously at the people. 

Todd slowly fell back, riding alongside me. His pose was casual, his expression easy, but his hand was on the hip, near his pistol. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” I hissed between my teeth, careful to keep my face relaxed.

“Could ask you the same,” Todd replied quietly, nodding at a woman who greeted me. 

“It’s custom, I didn’t think—” I glanced at him. “I only meant to say hello. Don’t shoot anyone over it, for hell’s sake, they fear you enough.” 

Todd gave me a slow gaze and his hand returned to the reins, though he was alert, and seeing how he watched people I did not wonder that he had been among the finest marksmen in the Kressosi army. For some months I had known an easy-going, laughing Todd. Now I saw the soldier, and I wondered what else I had yet to see. 

“How’s the little pup?” Todd asked. 

“Digging his skinny little elbows in,” I replied, patting Veland’s hands where they were clasped around my ribs. 

Todd smiled a little, but he didn’t relax. _  
_

_Sun on your head, Cousin.  
_

_Wind at your back, Cousin._

I heard a wailing suddenly, and a beggar came stumbling through the crowd—a beggar with a clubfoot, and a long gray braid falling out from his hood. Bili gave a sudden snort, swinging his head, and it took a hard jerk on the reins to bring him under again, his muscles quivering with tension between my knees. _  
_

_“Witch!”_ the beggar accused, a bony hand pointed to me. _“Traitorous witch! She runs with wolves at night and lays with murderers!”_

Hot shame and fury flooded my face. _“Who accuses me?”_ I snarled, pulling Bili around. _“Show me your face, old man.”_

I knew what I would see. The hood pulled back, and Weta smirked at me from under its shadow. His guise was older than the last time I had seen it, thin and worn. Todd was speaking to me but I did not hear him, my blood roaring in my ears. _“You bastard troll’s son,”_ I said, beginning to sense the game that was being played and not liking it one damned bit, _“hounding me across the north!”_

_“Look at her!”_ Weta shouted to the crowd. _“Riding with the white wolf pelt, and a horn at her breast! Death follows her wherever she goes.”_

It was that accusation, more than any of the others, that plunged a sword into my chest. The god knew how to strike at the softest flesh.

Pitalani had given me a knife, because every Atsa woman worth her weight in ivory carried one, and I did not think. I jerked the blade from my belt, no longer than the inside of my elbow to the inside of my wrist, but it gleamed, and people flinched back. Everyone except Weta, whose smile grew broad. Where he could not find a battle, a riot would suffice.

“Are you insane?” Todd hissed under his breath, his hand grasping my arm tight enough to bruise. “Whatever the hell’s going on, it ends now.” 

_“The death that follows me has only ever come for two kinds of people,”_ I spat, _“the ones I hate, and the ones I love.”_

A pair of skinny little elbows were digging into my ribs. “Ima,” Veland whispered, _“what’s going on?”_

Todd nearly ripped me out of the saddle, jerking me by the arm. He took the reins and the knife from me and gave the iciest scowl I had ever seen him wear. “Go on, all of you,” he shouted, “get the hell out of here.” 

Even if they didn’t understand the words, they knew the tone. The crowd stepped back, if they didn’t fully disperse, and with a smirk, Weta pulled his hood over his face once more, and vanished. 

“You were never like this in Kressos,” Todd muttered. 

I could have torn his throat out with my teeth, but all I did was grasp Veland’s hands where they were clasped about me. _“I’m sorry, puppy,”_ I whispered. _“I didn’t mean to scare you.”  
_

_#_

My heart did not settle inside the walls of that place. I was as skittish as a doe knowing there were hounds on her heels, and no place to hide. All my brave talk and still I could not make myself believe it. 

Maybe it was because he sensed my anxiety, or maybe it was only his own, because Veland clung to me like a child half his age, fists clutching my skirt, and when I stopped to stand for a moment he leaned into my side, hiding his face in my clothes when someone looked at him. I stroked his hair, as much to soothe myself as him. 

Neither Todd nor Muras spoke a word to me as the officers—unsettled by the scene on the street and not understanding it—showed us to our quarters. I was aware of Tyna’s gaze on me, but I ignored her, scanning the corridors for anything I recognized. 

I had only lived there three years. The longest, most miserable three years of my life, but only three years—and now, stripped of the tapestries, the art, I had to try and remember the shape of the halls, the map in my head. 

It was a blessed relief when I realized that we were not being taken to the king’s quarters. I would learn within a few days that what had once been Corasin’s chambers had been transformed into a central office, where a mistress such as myself would not be welcome, had I had any desire to see them again. 

As we drew deeper into Morhall, my heart sank. They were taking us to the rooms that had once belonged to the wives. 

I didn’t recognize the chambers prepared for Muras, though I knew beyond a doubt they were not mine, nor Roanna’s. They overlooked the flower gardens below, now in the height of bloom, a riot of colors that would fade before the first autumn frost. 

The officers had counted on a mistress.

They had not counted on a seven-year-old child and a prince’s physician. 

Tyna was to take a room some doors down from our own, once it had at least been dusted and new sheets set on the bed. I was told that a bed would be brought for Veland, and placed in one of the adjacent rooms of Muras’ chambers. 

They left us then, to give us time to settle, and Tyna excused herself. 

“Todd,” Muras said softly, “if you could take Veland down to the gardens.” 

Veland had to be persuaded to let go of my skirts. I told him I would be down to see him in just a little bit, but he should go explore, and see if he could find trolls hiding among the flowers. 

I could not look at Muras, as they left. 

“Please,” Muras said, in a firmly controlled voice, “explain to me what happened on the street.” 

I sat, busying myself with pulling off my traveling shoes. “The old beggar insulted me, I had to answer him.” 

“With a knife?”

“No, I—” I caught myself, looked away. “He was seeking to stir up trouble with the Wolf worshipers. Let them believe their Mother Wolf was in Kressosi hands.” 

“So what did he say that made you draw your knife?” Muras pressed, and I could sense that he was losing his patience with me, that all of this was too much for him and his ordered view of the world. 

_Death follows her everywhere_. “He spoke of Veland,” I said, “and I can take insults for myself, but not for my son.” It was the kind of lie I knew Muras could swallow. Something that would placate him for the time being.

Muras let out a breath, and when I chanced a look he had his back to me. His shoulders were slumped and weary. “This place,” he muttered, “this place will drive me mad.” 

“Muras—”

“Where did you get the horn?” He said, turning to look at me.

I was surprised into silence. “I told you, from—”

“From an old man, handing out magic horns, yes, I heard. Did he also give you his name?” Muras’ voice was sharp, in a way I did not like. 

I stared at him. “We’re a quarter of a year from Wetasur, what good would that do you?” 

“Who was he, Lya? What is that horn, and what does all of this have to do with your debt?” 

Muras had not spoken of my debt to the Wolf since I told him of it. I thought he had dismissed it as Sarenn superstition. 

“Are you the woman the wolf cult is expecting?” Muras asked.

Now I was dumbstruck. “You can’t believe that,” I said when I found my voice, not because it was ludicrous but because it was _Muras_ saying it. 

“The things I have seen in this hell-damned country,” Muras said, “I would believe it if you told me you were raised by a she-wolf and taught to speak by birds, and Veland the son of some wild forest god without a name.”

“It would have been better if his father had no name,” I whispered. Better if I had been raised by wolves. I pressed my fingers to my mouth, the horn resting heavy and warm against my chest. The wolf pelt glimmered like snowfall where I had folded it neatly on the bed. 

I could not tell Muras what Tyna wanted of me, what I suspected on some level the Wolf wanted of me. I could not tell him who I was, why this journey had changed me and made me wild. “If I am the Ima Vulgas they expect,” I said softly, “I suppose, by now, it would not surprise me.” 

Muras said nothing. 

“The man who gave me this horn,” I said, “was the same man who caused the trouble in the crowd today.”

“He followed us?”

“You could say that.” I glanced up at Muras. “There are more gods in this land than just the Wolf.” 

Muras let out a breath, and looked away. “And where does that put us?” he asked.

“Us?”

“You, me. Todd. Your son.” 

“I don’t know.”

“For a prophet,” Muras said, his voice very tired, “I wish you had more answers.”

A prophet. Another new name for me to wear. Sarenn did not have prophets. We had heroes, yes, and sorcerers and witches and wisefolk—but no prophets. Azira had prophets aplenty, and I suppose Kressos once had them, but not Sarenn. Our gods seldom made use of us in that way. 

Weta had said I was not a witch. Perhaps Muras wasn’t wrong, when he called me a prophet. 

But a prophet of what?

“Who was your husband that his death warrants this kind of price?” Muras asked. 

I was glad that Muras could not feel the way my heart jumped into my throat. 

“He was a man,” I said. “A mortal one.” 

#

Veland leapt at me out of the blueberries, his face streaked with dirt and the purple evidence of snacking on the berries, grinning as he wrapped both arms around my legs. “Ima,” he said, paying me no mind as I picked twigs and leaves from his hair, _“how long are we going to stay here?”  
_

_“A long time,”_ I said, _“until Commander Emiran is told to go somewhere else. Where’s Todd?”_

Veland gave me a wicked smile, and two hands closed on my waist and I shrieked like a child, jumping nearly out of my skin. 

Todd laughed, in a much better mood than when he left me. “Never gets old,” he said, letting me go. He paused, face going more serious, and let out a breath. “You talked about it?”

“Yes.” I tried to be careful with my face, so Veland didn’t ask me what was wrong. 

Todd nodded, and what he thought of all this I couldn’t know. As free as he was with his smiles, Todd rarely shared his troubles with me. Even less so, I imagine, when I was the source of the trouble. “I’ll talk with you later,” he finally said. “Do you need anything?”

I shook my head. “You should settle in,” I told him. “We could all do with a bath before dinner, I think.” 

“That one especially,” Todd said, tapping Veland’s dirty cheek with a curled knuckle. “He’s half rabbit, I think.” 

I smiled a little, and put a fingertip to the end of Veland’s nose. _“We must get you washed.”  
_

_“Is the water cold?”_ Veland asked, wrinkling his nose.

I shook my head. “Come, let’s go ask where the baths are.” I knew full well where to find the baths, but I would not let anyone think I knew the palace too well. 

Veland ran and bounced in the corridors, looking around in wonder at the high vaulted ceilings, the glowing lamps, and the Kressosi paintings on the walls. There were not many, and the walls felt expansive and empty for it. I wondered what had become of the centuries worth of tapestries that had once hung there. 

I hoped they had not been burned.

When we crossed paths with a soldier or officer, though, Veland would dart back to me once more, holding tight to my hand. I squeezed his callused little fingers, and stopped a maidservant to ask her where the baths were. She was Sarenn, and blinked in surprise when I spoke to her in our own language. She peered at Veland and me curiously, and turned in her path to take us there herself. _“These corridors still turn me around,” she said, “and I’ve worked here since the war ended.”_

I thought for a moment that they had never troubled me—until I remembered that I had seldom walked these halls without accompaniment for the first year of my life in Morhall. Even after, seldom were the wives of Corasin ever truly alone. 

_“Here you are, Miss.”_

I thanked her, and took Veland in to one of the smaller baths, tugging on the cord that would fill the shallow tub from the great boilers deep below. It was a system that had been built at great expense with the aid of Aziran and Luon engineers many decades ago, a great pit of coals tended night and day deep in the belly of Morhall, piping hot water to the baths and heated air up through chimneys in the walls, so that when winter came the heart of the palace was always warm. 

The water steamed and filled the room until I felt the sweat on my back. I was surprised to find that the water still smelled of sage and lavender, that the Kressosi had continued that practice. They were said to clean the spirit as well as the body, but I wondered if the Kressosi had left them simply because an army needed all the help it could get not to reek. 

Veland perched on a wooden chair, staring at the piping and the billowing steam. Even if he had been inside a bathhouse before, he never would have seen anything like this. 

I waited for the water to cool a little, pulling up my braid and twisting it around itself until it was a circle at the back of my head, tied with a ribbon. I took the jay feathers from Veland’s braid and did the same for him. When the water had cooled enough for Veland to get in I folded his clothes on the chair while he scrubbed. I took a rag to his face, rubbing away the blueberry stains and dirt. 

The hot water, when I got in, was a blessed balm to the ache in my back and legs. Veland drew patterns of the dark moles on my back as I washed, humming quietly to himself in Atsa. He stopped suddenly, as I was picking under my fingernails with the bristle of a brush. _“Do I have any brothers or sisters?”_

I didn’t look up. _“You have a brother in Kressos. His name is Kaspar, but his father calls him Kip.”  
_

_“Why is he there?”_

I didn’t know what to say. I splashed water over my face, to buy me a few moments. _“For the same reason you were with Pitalani. It was better for him.”_ Eager to turn the conversation in any other direction I said, _“You will have a new brother or sister by spring.”_

_“Really?”_ Veland sat on the side of the tub, grinned at me.

I nodded. _  
_

_“I hope it’s a sister,”_ Veland said.

_“Oh? Why’s that?”_

Veland splashed the water with his feet. _“Because girls fight better.”_


	8. Silence and Sound

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warning for implied child death

“Mrs. Emiran,” a shy young soldier said, handing me an envelope much worse for the wear, “this came for you.”

Everyone in Morhall called me Mrs. Emiran, though I could not fathom why, but in the end, I decided not to correct them. It made men especially wary of offending me, and women more discreet about looking in Muras’ direction, and those were luxuries I could bring myself to enjoy. Luxuries I would never have had in Kressos. 

“Thank you, sir,” I said softly, taking the envelope. I waited until the young man had left me to look down, and my throat constricted. I would have recognized Kaspar’s writing in half-light, with little to go by but the smell of the ink I had spent so many hours scratching into his ledgers. His letters were tall and straight, as densely packed as brambles in a thicket, enough to be illegible if he were not painstakingly neat. 

I pressed the envelope into my lap, looking up when Veland called for me. He was playing with some of the other children, the children of mistresses and maidservants, and not being able to understand each other’s speech didn’t seem to stop them in the slightest. 

Veland came running to me with something caught in his hands. It was, he revealed, a small butterfly, pale yellow wings splayed out against his palm. _“What’s it called in Sarenn?”_

“Fithrild,” I said. _“These ones like wildflowers the best.”_ I had spent many summers with Julas catching butterflies in the fields around Arborhall. The small yellow things had flourished in the fields, sometimes stopping to rest on the backs of sheep. 

Veland repeated _fithrild_ with me a few times, and when the butterfly floated away on the breeze he ran to rejoin the other children. 

I rubbed the worn paper of the envelope between my fingers. I could feel something wrapped inside the paper, an oval shape hardly bigger than the hollow of my palm, and a chain. 

I was careful in opening it, parting the wax seal with my fingernail. I had used to seal Kaspar’s letters, pressing the Heita crest into deep green wax that matched the color of Kaspar’s favorite jacket. I was the shadow behind him in those years, the shadow his brothers never acknowledged, the reason his wife and children never visited his house in the city.

A silver locket fell cold and heavy into my palm, its chain trailing across my fingers. There was a letter, but I pressed my fingernail into the edge and parted the halves of the locket, and felt my breath catch in my throat. 

The portrait was carefully done, a boy of just two, as light-faced as his father, but where Kaspar had eyes of pale green, Kip’s were the brown of rich earth, and there was no mistaking the shape of his mouth or the feathery black eyelashes that I saw whenever I looked in the mirror. His hair was no longer than his chin, black and unruly, with loose ringed curls that I could not imagine where he would have inherited them from. Kaspar’s hair fell as straight as my own. 

This was my screaming wolf pup, with the same curious dark eyes that Veland had. 

In the other side of the locket, carefully tied in a bit of thread, was a curl of black hair. I brought it to my lips, soft as down feathers, and closed my eyes. It smelled faintly of hair oil, tinged with mint. I wondered if his nurse sang to him when she brushed it into his hair. If she loved him.

I carefully returned the hair to the locket, and clasped it to my breast as I smoothed the letter in my lap to read.

_Dearest Lya,  
_

_I hope you can forgive me for my lateness in writing you directly, or rather for writing you at all, if that is what troubles you. I hope you are well in Morhall, I have heard the journey is long and difficult, though I suppose you are no stranger to long and difficult travel.  
_

_Kip is well, he has recently recovered from a mild fever, and you would not be able to tell that he was ill at all. Certainly, he terrorizes his nurse enough. I will be taking a brief stay in Port Sairun, and have chosen to bring Kip with me. I suspect I spoil him, and he finds Miss Kenna’s soft discipline to be near tyranny. I suppose fathers are permitted to spoil their youngest sons.  
_

_I hope the locket I have sent is not unwelcome. I had one made for myself, and I thought that you may wish to have a copy. If you do not, please feel free to return it.  
_

_If it is not too much trouble, I would like to hear from you. Muras tells me little but that you are well, and while I am glad to hear it, I should like to know if there is aught he is not telling me, out of concern for your privacy. If there is anything to be told, I do not wish to presume.  
_

_My best wishes,  
K.H._

“Ima? _Is everything alright?”_

I wiped at my eyes and smiled, pushing stray hair out of Veland’s face. I opened the locket to show him the portrait. _“This is your brother,”_ I murmured. _“Maybe someday you will meet him.”_

#

_Kaspar,  
_

_I hope this letter finds you well. I am getting settled here, though I haven’t yet gotten used to the deference I’m given.  
_

_Thank you for the locket. It means more to me than you can know. Kip looks very like you, I’m glad to hear that he’s well. Someday I hope I will be able to see him in person, if that is no trouble to you. I would like him to meet his elder brother, Veland, who I was reunited with on my journey.  
_

_If I could ask a favor of you, I know that you still have many friends in the court. If you hear any rumors regarding Muras, or of a woman known as Lady Lor Tyna, please write to me immediately. Removed as we are here from gossip and whispers, we cannot know what stories might be stirring beyond our control.  
_

_I have enclosed a small gift for Kip, an ivory wolf I was able to purchase from a trader that I hope he will like. Please give him my love, since I cannot be there to give it myself.  
_

_L_

#

A mistress can be forgiven many things that a Kressosi officer cannot. A superstitious Sarenn mistress can be forgiven for seeking out a wisewoman to purify her sleeping quarters and hang charms against evil, and if the officer sleeps more easily as a result, that is no concern of his subordinates. A mistress can be forgiven for declining visitors that would disturb the officer’s rest, and she can be forgiven for pulling him away from his work for a walk through the city, even if it is more for his assurance that his mistress is not putting herself in danger. 

Muras’ presence generally deterred anyone from speaking to me for too long, if at all, but eyes followed us wherever we went, and I was aware of all of them. 

“Sarenn women are not much for silk gloves, are they?” Muras asked, surveying the contents of the dressmaker’s shop. 

“It would hide the careful care of their nails,” I replied playfully, as Todd teased me for how carefully I tended mine. “There was a time when wealthy women wore silk sleeves or hand covers that left their fingers bare, but it was soon replaced by a fashion for using woad to paint on the back of the palm.” It had been painstaking work but I had been quite fond of it. I had used to wear a design of knots folding in on each other, with a hound at the center. Handpainters were skilled women, more than worth their weight in ivory.

I admired a red silk hair scarf embroidered in silver thread, delicate vines and leaves twining over each other. 

“I’d like to see it on you,” Muras murmured. 

I smiled shyly and tied the scarf over the top and crown of my head before the old gilt mirror, letting its long tails fall over my shoulders. I stared at myself for a moment, caught off guard by how much I looked like my mother. Not in my face, but in my eyes. My bearing.

“Do you want it?” Muras asked, meeting my gaze in the mirror. 

“It’s only a pretty thing—” I started. 

“What are men for if not buying pretty things for their mistresses?” Muras murmured into my ear, giving me a smile I hardly saw anymore. “Choose whatever you like.”

I did take the hair scarf, and another that was pale cream and embroidered with sunflowers. I bought beads for my hair, and for Veland rooster feathers that were the burning orange of coals and the green-black of water weeds. Set loose on every luxury I had been denied in Kressos, I purchased a small jar of hair oil scented with pine, herbs for my baths, and most precious of all—a notebook, of fine crisp paper bound in rhino leather. 

“What?” I asked, when I noticed Muras smiling at me. We were sitting on the edge of a grassy field, where cattle were grazing and we were shaded by the boughs of an aging fir, the ground softened by years of fallen needles. It was peaceful, quiet.

“I haven’t seen you smile this much since I met you in Jasos.” 

I glanced away, half-consciously touching the locket at my throat. 

“You don’t need to explain yourself,” Muras said. “I know how unfriendly Gira was to you.” Muras put his arm around my waist, and I leaned into his chest. I could sense there was a question he was building to, something he was not sure how to ask. 

“You’re going to seek out the wolf cult, aren’t you?”

I closed my eyes, turned my face into his shirt. “I think I have to.” 

Muras’ arm tightened about me. “I will go with you.” 

I opened my eyes and sat up. “You can’t.”

“I can, and I will,” Muras replied. “You seem to have a way of getting yourself in trouble.”

“No one will speak to me if you’re there,” I said.

“They may not speak to you anyway,” Muras said, “but after that incident at our arrival, I think they will.” He grasped my hand, kissed my fingers. “I won’t let you go there alone.” 

I should have argued more, should have fought him, but I could not. I wanted, so badly, to believe there was someone in the world who wished to protect me even from what I could not be protected from. I wanted to believe someone loved me that much. 

I wrapped my fingers around his. “You must let me do the talking,” I said, soft.

Muras gave me a crooked smile. “You think any of them will speak a word I can understand?” 

I kissed his mouth. “Not understanding has rarely stopped a man from speaking.”

Muras laughed softly and brushed his lips over my cheek. “Maybe, but I have spent too many meetings holding my tongue with the prince to not know how to keep quiet.” 

“Oh?” I asked, tracing my thumb along his jaw. “How quiet can you keep?”   
Muras smiled, pulling me into his lap. “Quiet enough.”

#

“I am going as well,” Lady Tyna announced. 

I glanced up under the ministrations of the maid I was paying to braid my hair. “For what ungodly reason would you need to accompany me?” 

“I have an interest in knowing what you’re up to,” Tyna replied, her arms folded over her chest. She had come to my quarters unannounced and uninvited, claiming to want to ask me how I was sleeping, and how my pregnancy was progressing. “Furthermore, your man is an idiot, however well-intentioned he may be, and allowing the Vulgason, of all people, into a sacred space—”

“We do not know it is sacred,” I said. “The Kressosi call it a temple, but they hardly know a god from a troll.” 

“You know that it is a place where the vulnerable go,” Tyna said. “And you want to bring a kingslayer there.” 

“Don’t speak as if you are so far above kingslayers.” The maid finished with my hair, and I pressed two round silver coins into her palm. Her eyes went wide and she thanked me profusely, secreting the silver away in the bosom of her dress.

“I’ve never seen someone so vastly overpaid,” Tyna muttered as the maid left. 

“She has a little one,” I said, “some Kressosi soldier’s bastard. He won’t have anything to do with her now, of course. And it’s not my money.” 

Tyna’s hard expression softened a little. “Men’s mistresses have spent too much silver on more frivolous things.” She paused, and looked to me once more. “Still, I will go with you. You will have business to attend to, I imagine. Someone will need to mind your… attachment.” 

I rose, lifting my knife from the vanity, and touching the sheathed tip to Tyna’s collar. “What,” I said slowly, “in the name of the Wolf, makes you think I would for a second leave you alone with Muras?” 

Tyna let the sheath rest where it lay. “I thought I made it clear that my agenda is not what I was sent to do.” 

“So you say. And what kind of fool would I be, after all I have been through, to trust a murderess?” I held her gaze. “Whatever help you may offer me, it is for your own gain. If I must be pawn to a god, so be it. I’ll not be pawn to any mortal man or woman.” 

“I don’t want you to be a pawn, Miss Sargis,” Tyna said. She gently raised the sheath with her fingers, though she did not push it away. “I wish to be your partner.” She checked over her shoulder that we were alone. “I understand why you do not trust me,” she said. “But you, of all people, must know that this is bigger than either of us.” 

“Just because it is bigger than me,” I said, “does not mean it must concern you.” 

“Well. Fair enough. I think you will find this place very lonely if your only allies are maidservants, though.” Tyna looked at me carefully. “I will go with you. And if you like, I shall sit as far away from the good commander as I am physically able. But I will go, and you cannot stop me.” 

I imagined that, if pressed hard enough, I could find a way, but I was satisfied. She was not wrong that I need allies, and dangerous though she was, I had a sense that I was beginning to understand. The Wolf and Weta worked against each other as often as they worked together, and this, I thought, was not so different. For the moment, it seemed we wanted the same thing—but she would not have my trust that easily. 

I fastened the knife to my belt, and sat again to tie my hair scarf. It looked odd against my Kressosi dress, but I would have a proper Sarenn fit again soon. I had made Muras let me handle the haggling over prices, supposing that every merchant we met was doing just fine fleecing every other officer who wanted to buy a pretty thing for his mistress. 

It was strange—I felt like myself again, wearing Sarenn finery. I wasn’t yet sure what that feeling meant. 

“What I can’t understand,” Tyna said, leaned up against the wall. “Is what you want.”

I did not ask her what she meant, but that didn’t stop her from explaining. “Say you free Saren from kings,” she said, “whatever that means. Say you achieve all this, and have life left to live. What then? What do you do when the Wolf has no more use for you?”

“Assuming that when he has no more use for me, I will still be alive,” I said.

“Yes.” 

I considered my reflection in the mirror, considered all the women I had been. “I will return to my family,” I said, “if there is a family to return to, and if they will have me. If not… the Kiruk Atsa have always been kind to me. Perhaps they will still have kindness in their hearts for whatever the Wolf has made of me by then.” 

#

I left Veland in Bili’s care. I pinched the ear of the elk between my fingers, whispering, _“If harm comes to him I will have you made into sausage.”_ Bili gave a disgruntled noise, and I believed that he understood me. 

The field that the elk pastured in was great and broad, and I had no doubt that Veland would be able to keep himself busy until we returned, and with my fierce beast at hand, no one would even dream of touching him. 

I cupped Veland’s face in my hands, and kissed his forehead. _“Wait for me until I return.”  
_

_“Yes, Ima.”_

_“I’ll bring you something special,”_ I promised, giving him a wink. _“If you need something, Todd will be here.”_ We would only be gone a few hours, but I worried. I could hardly close my eyes at night unless I had crawled into the narrow bed where Veland slept, listening to him breathe. 

Muras pulled me up into the saddle behind him, because though I had convinced him that a carriage would be worse than ungainly in narrow Sarenn streets, even I was not fool enough to think I wanted to walk all that way. 

Tyna rode just behind us, and I watched the street with my temple on Muras’ shoulder. Some people recognized me, and a few called out greetings which I returned, but it was quiet, and wary. 

The home of the Wolf cult was a long pine lodge, like old Sarenn halls before the days of kings. The main doors were painted, a great figure of the Wolf swallowing the sun. A few people milled about, but when they saw Muras, they made themselves scarce. 

The ground in this part of the town was muddy and the air stank. I was glad I had worn my traveling boots when I slid out of the saddle and sank into the muck. 

For a moment I just stood, looking at the new timber and the smoke rising from the vents in the ceiling. I wore the wolf pelt around my shoulders, as much to advertise who I was as to keep warm. I could feel eyes on me as I looked at the lodge. 

The doors parted, splitting the Wolf in half, and a woman stood on the threshold, gazing at me. She was pale and worn looking, her skin blistered red with a disease, and her hair shaved. There were fresh cuts on her scalp, and I wondered if her hair had been cut for adultery, or some other disgrace. 

I picked my way across the mud to her, keeping a respectful distance and inclining my head. _“Sun on your head, Cousin.”_

The woman’s eyes were watery and grey, like autumn sky under full clouds. She nodded back to me. _“Wind at your back. Cousin.”_ A small smile formed on her chapped lips. _“I wondered when we would see you.”_

I did not know what to say to that. _“My name is Lya Sargis,”_ I said. _“I… have many questions.”_

The woman nodded and looked over my shoulder, at Tyna and Muras. _“I am called Spider, here.”_

Spider took us into the lodge, and gloomy though it was, I could see people on bedrolls by the wall. Some were clearly sick or injured, others seemed only to be trying to sleep. Muras was quiet, keeping close to me, and Spider brought us to the hearth fire in the center of the lodge, offering us cushions to sit on. They were full of old straw and crunched when handled, giving off a stale, musty smell. 

I was surprised at how warm the lodge was, even with the floor nothing more than dirt covered over with moss and tree needles, so that it crushed softly under my boots, and smelled like deep forest.

Spider added wood to the fire and stirred a cauldron that smelled strongly of broth and wild garlic before she turned back to us, and knelt on a cushion, wincing. 

_“Are you a leader here?”_ I asked, taking the pelt from my shoulders and folding it in my lap. I buried my fidgeting hands under its folds. 

Spider smiled a little. _“I suppose so. I was one of the first to come here, after the war.”_ Her eyes slid to Muras. _“This is the Wolf’s Son?”  
_

_“It is one of the names they call him by,”_ I said, after a moment’s pause. I was not sure if I was meant to explain my relationship to Muras. 

_“And you?”_ Spider asked. _“What names do they call you by, Lya Sargis?”_

I dug my fingers into the white wolf pelt. _“Have you seen the Wolf?”_ I asked her. 

Spider’s raincloud eyes glimmered in the low light. _“In my sleep,”_ she said, _“I often dream of her. That is why I came here.”  
_

_“Does he speak to you?”_ I pressed. _“Does he tell you things?”  
_

_“Does she speak to you?”_ Spider said, her brows rising slightly. _“She does not speak words to me, but I have learned many things from her. I saw with her once a companion, a strange creature. All white, except for her head and a stripe down her back, as black as crow feathers, and gums bloody red. A creature both hound and wolf at once.”_

I could hear Tyna whispering to Muras, translating. 

_“Have you seen the Wolf, then?”_ Spider asked. 

I hugged the pelt close. _“I called on him once, years ago. To free me from my husband. He came in a storm, and carried me away. He has called me back now, to pay my debt.”_

I paused, and decided that I would not find what I was looking for if I was not willing to share what I had been told. _“I have also seen Weta. He called me into the forests in Wetasur, and gambled over questions. He gave me a horn that howls like a wolf. He said that three—”_ I hesitated. _“—three men will die on my account, and my husband was the first. He said that when the Wolf howls, so will I.”_

At the last part, Spider’s posture changed. She sat up a little straighter, looked at me a little more carefully. 

_“When we were coming north,”_ I said, _“we were attacked by militia men. I sounded the horn and a wolf pack answered me, and drove them off. That night, I—I walked in wolfskin. Or—I was the wolf but the wolf was not me.”_

I could sense the shift in Muras, the unease, but I could not afford to think too much about him at this moment. I needed to know if there were answers here, if someone—anyone—could tell me what was expected of me. 

_“This horn,”_ Spider said, _“do you have it with you?”_

I had concealed it in the folds of the pelt, but I brought it out now, all weathered ivory and sharp fangs. Always it felt as warm as my own skin, and I did not like to have it too far out of reach.

Spider did not ask to see it any closer. She sat back, fingers pressed to her lips. 

_“All I want,”_ I said, _“is to know what I’m supposed to do.”_

Spider’s eyes flicked to my face. _“You think I have answers?”  
_

_“You are the only person I could think to turn to,”_ I said, _“this place—if there was anyone who could tell me—”  
_

_“I have no answers for you,”_ Spider said curtly. _“All I have known is that you were coming, that the Wolf has chosen you to be her voice. What you are meant to do with that, you will have to ask her yourself.”_

I felt as if a stone had been dropped into my stomach. 

Spider shifted, and began to get to her feet. _“Drink with us,”_ she said, _“eat with us. We will seek our answers together.”_

“Lya,” Muras said quietly. 

_“Thank you,”_ I told Spider. _“Please give us a moment.”_

Spider nodded, gazing at Muras for a moment before she turned her back on us, going to speak to an old man who sat by the north wall. 

“I am going to see if there is help I can offer,” Tyna announced, looking as if she might crawl out of her skin if she did not do something. She stood and shook out her skirts, lifting a jug of water and going to one of the sickbeds. 

Muras seemed unsettled. “Three men will die because of you.”

“The way it was said to me,” I said, “I know that neither you or Todd was one of them.” Not unless one of them became a king. I would worry when a crown sat on one of their heads, and not before. I had enough to fear already. 

“The other part,” he said, watching me, “the part about… walking in wolfskin.” 

I said nothing.

“Men died that night,” Muras said. “Killed by wolves. Much more than three men.” 

“Those were not the kind of men that Weta meant,” I said, soft. “And I did not know then what I was.”

Muras took in a slow breath and let it out. “What are you going to do if you don’t find the answers you’re looking for?”

I said all that I could say. “I don’t know.” 

Muras looked around the lodge. People did not try to hide that they were staring, but they looked away when Muras’ gaze turned on them. He made them nervous, I could smell it on the air as clearly as I could smell the hunger. “We’ve been invited to share food and drink with them,” I said. “You know something of Sarenn rules of hospitality.” 

Muras nodded. He glanced away and lowered his voice. “I wonder if the prince was not right to believe my loyalty endangered by you.” 

“Muras—”

“I may not know much about your gods,” he said, “but even I can sense when the tides of a place are turning against me, Lya. If there comes some danger to Todd, to me or my men—you would tell me, wouldn’t you?” 

I closed my eyes. “I don’t want any harm to come to you or Todd,” I said, quiet. “I know that much. I won’t let any harm come to you, as long as I am able.”

Muras grasped my hand. “Thank you.” 

I closed my hands over his. “I trust,” I whispered, “that if there were any danger to me that you learned of, you would do the same.” 

Muras did not ask me what I meant. He assumed what he would, and kissed my temple. “No man will lay a hand on you,” he whispered. “Not as long as you’re by my side.” 

I could feel the eyes burning into my back, and I gently pulled away. “We should not stay too long,” I said, “I don’t want to be a burden to them.” 

We ate a little food, not a meal, but enough. Small fry cakes with wild blueberries, and cool milk. Muras was quiet. Tyna did not join us, too busy tending to the sick and injured, but I murmured translations as Spider told me a little of what they had faced, since they began to come together under the walls of Morhall. Soldiers made a hobby of harassing them, and they had twice had to douse fires meant to destroy their lodge. Taking in the sick was not simply an act of kindness, it was also strategic—it kept the soldiers from coming inside. 

Spider’s hair had been cut when she was arrested by Kressosi soldiers, for ‘creating unrest.’ For three days they had held her in Morhall’s dungeons, without food or water, before she had been released. _“There has not been much hope that the arrival of the Vulgason will improve things.”_

There was a silence between the tree of us. Muras looked up, and gave a slight nod of his head. “Your hospitality will not be forgotten.” 

Spider nodded, and said that we were welcome guests, and she would be happy to receive us again. She eyed Tyna, studiously cleaning an infected wound without so much as a crinkle of the nose. _“Her, especially.”_

I approached Tyna when Spider left us, as she moved between patients. “Muras and I will be returning to Morhall,” I said.

Tyna nodded. “I will return at length. I have work yet to do here.”

“Don’t overtire yourself,” I said. 

Tyna looked at me strangely. 

“It has been a long time,” I said quietly, “since there was anyone who understood anything about me.” 

She gazed at me for a moment, and nodded. “Get some rest, Miss Sargis, don’t worry over me.” 

#

Veland fell asleep in my arms that evening, the wolf pelt pulled over his shoulders. I was much too warm, but couldn’t bear to wake him, and I sat on his bed, listening to Muras and Todd talk softly in the next room. 

Veland stirred in his sleep, and I felt the hard lump of the ivory wolf’s head against my chest. I had to ask the Wolf myself, Spider said. There were no answers for me among mortal men. 

My eyes fell on my war horn, laying on my coat. The wolf’s maw frozen in its perpetual snarl. 

“Still awake?” Todd asked quietly, putting his head through the door.

I pressed a finger over my lips, and whispered, “Don’t wait up for me.” 

Todd nodded, and I listened for a long time until I was certain all was quiet. 

Gently, I laid Veland in the bed, leaving the wolf skin over him. I kissed Veland’s cheek, and whispered into the fur, _“Protect him for me.”_

Slipping my feet from my shoes so that I would tread lightly, I picked up the horn and my coat, moving quiet as a wraith through the rooms. I was no stranger to making a ghost of myself in these halls. I could press myself into any passing shadow, make my breath as soft as a feather’s touch. 

That night I only needed the stealth to slip unnoticed out of our rooms, and return my boots to my feet. I told the night watchmen that I could not sleep, and I was going for a ride. They could tell Muras where I had gone, should he ask, but they were not to wake him. One of the men at the gates had encountered my Bili before, and did not need much reassurance that my bull could sufficiently protect me from any trouble I might come across. 

Bili was alert as I went into the stables, as if he had expected me. He snorted and pawed at the door until I released him, prancing like a Kressosi show-pony. I did not put a saddle on his back, only looped the reins over his head. Bili huffed impatiently as I pulled myself astride. 

The night air was as warm as it ever got this far north, cool enough to make my skin prickle in the breeze. Bili tried to take a bite out of the guardsmen as we left the gates, and the city was mostly quiet. A few lanterns burned outside of taverns, but once I was out of sight of the gates, Bili and I cut to the north, and the town thinned and dissipated, and we were soon within the safety of the forest.

No leafed trees grew here in the north. Hardy dark needles scratched my cheeks as I rode, trusting Bili to take me through the dark. I looked skyward once or twice, finding the flat egg of the waxing moon floating in the dark, as pale as ice, pale as death. I could hear snow lions miles off in the east, and wolves in the west. Deep in the woods, I pulled Bili to a halt, and slid to the ground. The horn was fire-hot under my coat, and thrummed like my own heart. 

I lifted the horn to my lips, and howled. 

For a moment, the air went still, the echo of the howl fading into the trees. 

Bili stayed close to me, so that I could feel the heat of his breath on my back. 

Once more, three times I made the horn howl, the eerie sound feeling as if it came from my own throat. My heart thundered in my chest as I waited. 

The answering howl did not come from any throat or horn. It came on the wind, a sudden frigid blast that shook the trees and cut me to the bone. I backed into Bili, fear climbing up my throat. 

The shape that came through the trees I would have known with my eyes closed, the coppery smell of blood and the sharp sting of cold filling my nose. Bigger than any bear and as white as moonlight, the Winter Wolf came through the trees in silence, overwhelming all else as crystals of ice formed on the trees and the ground. My mind screamed that I should fall to the ground, beg for mercy, but the body did not obey. I stood, and waited. 

Frost-rimed and blood-eyed, the Wolf gazed at me, and waited. 

It took me some time, to find my voice. “I want to know what I am meant to do.” 

The Wolf said nothing. 

“Please,” I said, “just tell me what I’m supposed to do, and I’ll do it.” 

The wind answered me, and though I knew it was fiercely cold, I did not feel it with the bite it should have had. _It is yours to do with as you will._

“I don’t understand. You brought me here to pay my debt—”

_You will pay it._ The Wolf leaned forward, his freezing breath on my face, the stench of death smothering me. _You will pay it with the blood of thieves and murderers. You will pay it with the breaking of chains._

The Wolf changed then, shape twisting like mist into that of the woman I had dreamed about. She reached out and her fingers sank into my chest, wrapping around the fragile muscle of my heart. _You know what you must do with what you have been given._

“More death, always more death!” I cried. “I am soaked in blood and you want me to give you more?” 

Her fingers tightened. _You will drown in blood if you do not act. You know this._ The Wolf brought her face close to mine, wild eyes holding me to the spot. _If you do nothing it is the blood of your family that will be on your hands._

“You killed Róana.” The words came out of me raw and sharp. “I asked you to kill the man I hated most and you took the woman I loved with him. Wasn’t that price enough?”

Silence. The hand withdrew from my chest, and I felt as if I could breathe again. But I saw, behind my eyes, things I did not want to see. I saw Róana, knowing that the Kressosi were coming, and that there would be no stopping them. I saw what I knew was poison in her hands, saw her comforting Ferhildr and Torsten, telling them that they would sleep, and when they woke there would be no more nightmares. “Please stop,” I whispered “Stop, I don’t want to see anymore.”

The vision faded, and I sank to my knees, shuddering. 

_I will not tell you how to do it,_ the Wolf said, _but you know what must be done._

I could not look up, wouldn’t have if I had been able. “Róana didn’t deserve to end like that.”

_The dead are dead. You must think of those that still live._

I thought of Veland, sleeping under the wolf skin, not knowing what he was. Of Kip, so far away from me. Of Julas, and my mother. I gave a sob, and covered my face with my hands. 

_Where war ended, it will begin again. You ended it. Begin what you must._

I dug my hands into the dirt. I made my choice, and that is why I was chosen. Wasn’t that what Weta had said? “The folk that worship you in the city,” I said, “what of them?” 

The Wolf shrugged, and gave me an indifferent look. _They may be your allies, or not._

“Will you protect them?”

_Will you?_


	9. Begin Again

Dawn found me bone-tired, stretching out in bed as carefully as I could to not wake either Todd or Muras. Todd rolled over in his sleep and threw an arm over me, and I was glad of the warmth. I had a few hours, at least, before either would wake and think to ask where I had been, or why there were pine needles in my hair. 

It seemed I had hardly closed my eyes but I opened them again, groggy and not sure why I had woken until I registered Veland’s face much too close to mine, peering at me. I groaned and rubbed my face with one hand, turning over onto my back. The bed was much emptier now. Todd and Muras had left without waking me. 

“What is it, puppy?” I asked, turning my head to look at Veland.

He was sitting on the bed with the wolf pelt over his head and shoulders, looking like a feral little pup himself. “I brought you breakfast.” He pointed at the bedside table, where there was a plate. “You were going to miss it.” 

“Oh. Thank you, puppy.” I scrubbed my face again and sat up, squinting at the food. Boiled eggs, berries, and fried baby potatoes. Most blessed of all, a still-steaming cup of Aziran black tea that smelled of cloves. I went for that first, hoping it would soothe the burning dry at the back of my throat. 

“Where did you go last night?” Veland asked.

I glanced at him. “What do you mean?”

“I woke up and you weren’t with me, and you weren’t in here.” 

“You shouldn’t snoop or wander around,” I said, a little reproachfully. “You need to stay in bed until morning.” 

Veland shrugged. “Where did you go?”

I picked pine out of my hair. “Into the forest.” I smiled a little, pinched his cheek. “To see your _eba.”_

Veland’s eyes went wide. “You saw White Wolf?” 

I nodded, and leaned in close. “He says to be good and obey your mother.” 

“Ima,” Veland groaned. 

I smiled and mussed his hair. “Let me eat and wake up a bit, yeah? We have to start your lessons today.” 

Veland sulked, lolling about on the bed while I picked over my breakfast. I was moody, thinking on my meeting with the Wolf. To begin again what had ended, to pick up the thread and continue the tapestry. Just how I was meant to do any of that, or what good would come of it, was not for me to know.

A price paid in blood, but not mine. 

Women did not start wars. _Mothers_ did not start wars. I would have another child in the spring, and what was I to do? Rally a group of invalids and outcasts to my cause? We would be slaughtered, faster than any militia. Kressosi men had no mercy in their hearts for Sarenn women. 

I winced at the thought, thinking of Muras. Of Todd. But then, a voice whispered in the back of my mind, how far would their mercy extend, if they knew who you were? If they knew who Veland was?

If I had any power outside of the gifts I had been given, it was in the very thing that was most dangerous to me and my children. 

“Ima,” Veland whined, when he saw that I was only staring into space. 

“Sorry, puppy,” I said, mussing his hair. “My mind is roaming away without me.” I finished the plate he had brought me, and sat Veland in front of the mirror to comb and braid his hair. He fidgeted, unaccustomed to sitting still for any length of time, and the novelty of polished glass mirrors having worn off for him. 

“Now wash your face,” I said, “and go run some of that energy off, I’ll be down in the gardens in a little while.” 

I splashed cold water on my face and tried not to give too much contemplation to how tired I looked as I braided my hair and tied a scarf over my head. Whatever I was meant to do, it would have to wait until spring, after I had given birth. Nothing could be done in winter except to wait, and think. 

Tyna came to my mind. I still was not certain I trusted her. I had not trusted anyone since I had lost Róana.

I don’t know what spurred me then that had not before. I dressed quickly and went out into the corridor, and walked down the corridor until I could be certain of where I was. This was the old salon, a common space for the wives of the king, a place where I had spent many hours embroidering or playing cards. The table and chairs were still there, though everything else was gone. 

I stood for a moment, glad that there were no servants or soldiers about, reorienting, calling up old memories in my mind. 

Róana’s rooms had lain to the east of the salon. I traced my hand along the wall of the corridor, so strangely bare and colorless. I could tell that this wing was not often used, the air was colder here, and cobwebs gathering along the ceiling. 

My feet recalled the path more than my mind did, and brought me to what had once been Róana’s door. 

I shivered as I stood before it, not sure if I could bring myself to look inside. 

I pressed my palms against the door, closing my eyes. This room had been my refuge, my place of solace. Róana, with her smile, even when her eyes were sad. Róana who had dried my homesick tears and taught me how to survive. Ferhildr and Torsten who had been as dear to me as if they were my own children. 

My hand found the knob, and a dusty blast of stale air hit my face.

I learned, then, what had become of Morhall’s tapestries, rolled up like rugs and stacked carelessly to gather dust and mildew. There were other things, furniture that the Kressosi presumably had not yet found a use for, various detritus of palace life they had not seen fit to burn. 

Muras had told me once that any personal items belonging to the wives and their children had been returned to their families, so I did not look for anything that had belonged to Róana. Instead I only looked at the walls, the grimy windows that had once overlooked the fields. I had half expected to find it as I remembered it, warm and bright and safe, the one place I could trust in finding a sympathetic ear. 

The bed there was the same, though the blankets and mattress were gone. I knew it by the carving, a gift from Róana’s family. On the headboard a hare twisted to sniff the air, as if sensing danger. I had used to wonder if they knew, when they chose that image. I ran my fingers over the dusty oak, whispered, “I’m so sorry, Róana. It wasn’t supposed to happen like that. It wasn’t supposed to hurt you. Wherever you are… you have to know how sorry I am.” 

I could almost hear her gentle voice in that room, her rare laugh, deep and hearty and shining through her smile. I wished I could ask her advice, wished I could tell her everything that had happened in the last seven years and introduce her to my sons. 

Ferhildr would be a young woman, if she lived. Sixteen. In my mind I could see her becoming as beautiful as her mother, still half a wild girl, with a caravan of lovestruck suitors in her wake. A princess of Saren to make her mother proud.

I wiped at my eyes, and remembered that I had sent Veland down to the gardens. I turned away from the room, doing my best to compose myself as I shut the door behind me, and made my way back out. A maid passed me in the corridor and looked at me strangely, but I did not look at her, and quickened my step. 

Out of every wife of Corasin, I was the one who had survived. I was the one mad enough to flee into the snow, to entrust my life to a god of white death. And I had lived. 

I was a daughter of Anar, a granddaughter of Liane, descended of wolves. I was the mother of the last son of the Forset line, and the woman who brought the Winter Wolf to Morhall. 

Weta said I had been chosen when I proved myself, and I still did not know what it was I had proved myself to be, but I thought I might be beginning to have an idea. Saren had not had kings, and then it had. 

Begin again what was ended. Time means little to gods. All things move in cycles—years, tides, moons. The age of Sarenn kings, I thought, was ended. 

But Saren itself—Saren had never needed kings. 

Saren had only ever needed its people. 

#

I knew Veland was overwhelmed by the look of despair on his face. “You don’t have to learn them all at once, puppy,” I said, carefully picking my way around the alphabet I had scratched into the dirt. “This is just a start. I won’t even make you try to write them yet.” I pinched his ear, to shake him out of it. “Let’s go through them a few at a time, okay? You’re learning to speak and read it at the same time, that’s a lot. We’ll take it slow.” 

I knew I wouldn’t be able to get him to sit still for long yet, but the Atsa taught their children much about the world in song, and I thought the same might work here. All I needed was a tune. 

Just an hour or so, I thought. He would be cooped up inside for the winter soon enough, and then he might not find the idea of reading lessons so torturous. If I could have him writing his own name before the first snow, that would be accomplishment enough. 

“Alright,” I said, as I could see Veland growing frustrated. “That’s enough for today. Here, hold still.” I rubbed a smudge of dirt from his cheek with my thumb, and kissed his forehead. “Go on and play.” 

I erased our alphabet with my shoe, humming under my breath. I glanced up to find Lady Tyna returning from the town, her physician’s bag under her arm. She looked weary, but pleased. “Tending to the sick again?” I asked, resting my teaching stick on my shoulder. 

Tyna hadn’t noticed me. She laughed a little. “Delivered a pair of twins. Small, but both alive, and their mother too.” Tyna set down her bag, looking exhausted. 

“You were there all night, weren’t you?”

“And most of the day before,” Tyna said, rubbing her face. She looked at me critically for a moment, as she did when examining her patients. “You look as tired as I feel.” 

I glanced away. 

“Is it your dreams?”

My hand tightened around the stick. “It wasn’t a dream,” I said, soft. 

Tyna gazed at me, and I could not look quite directly at her. _“What did he say?”_ she asked. 

I closed my eyes. _“Where the war ended, it will begin again.”_

Tyna let out a slow breath. _“I suppose I don’t need to tell you that you should not share that with your men.”_

I shook my head. I felt somewhere in my chest that a schism was coming, and I did not yet want to think on it. “I have a winter to survive,” I said, “for now, that is all I can do.”

Tyna nodded slowly. “You should visit the Wolf-worshippers again.”

I did not ask her what she meant. “Get some rest, Tyna,” I said. “I may need your help in teaching my son his languages.” Veland had to learn Sarenn, at the least, but a grasp of Kressosi would be a boon, and Aziran even better. It was too much to teach him all at once, but already he was behind where any noble child would be by his age. 

I brushed that thought away. Veland was only Veland, not an Anarin or a Forset. I would not give him any false father’s name. If he was to be anything, he was to be Veland Lyasson, as good as bastard born, and safer for it. 

Tyna gave me a curious look, and then a bit of a smile. “I don’t know what kind of teacher I’ll be, I was never much for children after I helped their mothers birth them. But if you need help, I’ll see what I can do.” 

“Tyna,” I said, as she turned away. “Thank you.”

She gazed at me a moment longer, and nodded. “Take care of yourself, Sargis.” 

#

“Are you well?” Todd asked, looking at me closely. We were riding, enjoying what brief summer we would have before the frosts came. Veland raced ahead of us on a borrowed old cow, who had just enough spirit to keep him interested. 

“Just not sleeping well, that’s all,” I said. “I just have to get used to this place.” 

Todd was quiet for a bit, as if he was deciding whether or not to believe me. “Muras seems convinced you’re some kind of… northern prophet.” 

I didn’t say anything, because I didn’t know what I was supposed to say. 

“Everything I’ve seen,” Todd said slowly, “I don’t know how to make sense of it. But I don’t know that you… being some kind of chosen one makes much sense to me, either.” He was looking at me, and I wouldn’t meet his eyes. “What exactly are you supposed to do?” 

I drew in a breath, and said nothing. 

“I know that you would rather Saren be free,” Todd said, “but—”

“Please don’t speak of this.” I shifted in Bili’s saddle. “I don’t want to speak of this.” 

Todd watched Veland ahead of us, weaving the cow through the trees. “I just don’t see why anyone would want another war,” he said, soft.

I bit my lip, and thought of Branhild in Nolsaford. I thought of Julas and his Kressosi wife, of Sarenn men who cut their hair and shaved their beards. Of the fur trader, selling a white wolf pelt. “It wasn’t your home that fell,” I said, quiet. 

Todd’s eyes were on me again. “It would kill Muras if he was ordered to have you executed.” 

I looked at him, and wondered if he was so certain of Muras’ loyalty to the king, or if he just couldn’t allow himself to entertain any other possibility. “And you?” I asked. 

Todd’s mouth tightened. “I’ve never wanted harm to come to you, Lya.” 

Some bitter rage kicked up in me that I fought to quell. “It was too late for that when you became a soldier,” I said. 

Todd let out a slow breath. “What else is there,” he asked, “for a fourth son to do?”

I knew what he meant. There had always been war. There had always been room for new soldiers.

The summer breeze stirred a loose strand of hair on my cheek. I tucked it beneath the scarf. “I don’t know. If I give Muras a son, what would there be for him to do?” 

A heavy silence fell between us. Todd seemed not to know what to say, where the topic of my pregnancy was concerned. 

“I suppose it’s a mercy that you have black hair, at least,” Todd muttered, running a hand back through his own dark hair. “No one will think twice if the child doesn’t come out as blond and pale as Muras.” 

“You know that any child of yours would be as good as his own son.” 

“It doesn’t matter what Muras thinks,” Todd said, “not to his family, anyway. Not as long as you’re around.” 

No. No child of mine would ever be accepted by Muras’ family, unless I was removed from the picture, and the child raised Kressosi, never knowing of his Sarenn mother lest he be tainted by my blood. They would be harsh with him, even harsher than they were with Muras. 

If I left, I could not leave my child behind. I had done it twice already. I could not bear to do it a third time, knowing what lay in store. 

“I’m glad Veland came with us,” Todd said abruptly. “He’s a good kid.” 

They were strangely alike, Todd and my Veland. It would break Veland’s heart if we parted ways. 

And it would kill me to watch Saren die. 

#

_“Alright, do you remember the word for this I taught you yesterday?”_ I held up a mirror in the shop. 

Veland’s face scrunched as he concentrated, trying to remember. I thought it would be easier on him to keep some of our lessons on the move, to keep him active. It also gave me a reason to leave Morhall, and wander as freely as one could with a soldier quietly tailing me on Muras’ orders. I was able to ignore him, mostly, bored as he was, but I knew it bothered Veland. 

_“Uh… spail,”_ he guessed. 

_“Close. Spil.”_ I put the mirror down and smoothed Veland’s hair. _“Let’s keep going. What about this?”_ I pointed to an ivory comb, etched with the design of a songbird. 

_“Kambe?”_ Veland asked, uncertain.

I smiled. _“Very good.”_

“Mrs. Emiran,” the soldier spoke up, clearing his throat. “Someone here to see you.” 

I glanced up, and Tyna gave me a small wave. She made her way over to me, giving Veland a friendly smile. “Sounds like your lessons are going well.” 

“We’re making progress,” I said. Veland leaned into my side, pressing his face into my skirt. 

Sensing the question in the uncomfortable silence that followed, Tyna said, “I wondered if you might want to come to the lodge with me. They ask about you, sometimes.” 

I glanced at the soldier, and in a hushed voice said, _“If you can get rid of him, there’s not many places I won’t go.”_

Tyna smiled, and turned. “Ah, Mister—?”

The young man blinked, surprised to find Tyna’s attention turned to him. “Garod, ma’am.” 

“Mr. Garod,” Tyna said, with a charming smile. “You can leave Mrs. Emiran and her son in my care. We’re going for a stroll.”

Garod opened his mouth to protest, and Tyna shushed him with a finger to the lips that made his face positively flame red. “Now, Mr. Garod, I know you aren’t about to question Prince Andon’s very own surgeon. I know that isn’t how you would like your name to reach the prince’s ear, either.” She took her hand away, and smiled again. “Now, if you must, please do tell Commander Emiran that Mrs. Emiran and young Veland are with me, and that we shall be safely back in Morhall in time for dinner. That is all the assurance you need, I hope?” 

“…Yes, ma’am.” 

I hid a smile by turning to Veland and fussing at the collar of his shirt. _“We’re going for a walk with Lady Tyna,”_ I told him. _“There are some people I want to see. You can play with the other children when we get there.”_

Veland nodded, holding on to my skirt and Tyna and I made our way out of the shop, leaving an uncertain Mr. Garod behind us. 

“Young men are all the same,” Tyna murmured with a sly smile. She glanced at me with an arched eyebrow. “Your man doesn’t trust you not to get into trouble, I see.” 

“Can you blame him?”

“From his position it’s absurd to let you leave the castle at all.” Tyna had her physician’s bag under her arm. “Kressosi men are especially fussy about women in your condition, let alone women with your knack for creating a scene.” 

“You’ve been doctoring to Kressosi for too long, Lady Tyna,” I said, “to call pregnancy a ‘condition.’”

Tyna smiled again. “Perhaps you’re right.” 

I reflected briefly that Muras would be unhappy with this, but I no longer felt the weight of that unhappiness on my own heart. Tyna interrupted my thoughts before I could dwell long on it. In low Sarenn, she said, “I received a letter from the prince. It appears that sending your man all the way out here did not soothe his mind as much as he hoped.” 

My chest tightened. “What did he say?”

“Evidently some friends of our dear commander have been muttering about why he was sent so far, they want him back in Kressos. Someone was bold enough to express this to the prince, and he is hungry for any evidence that your man may use his power and influence against Andon. Not that he will need evidence, eventually. You may count yourself lucky that the winter will shut down any correspondence between here and Kressos for some months.” 

“Tyna—”

“You are my primary interest, Sargis, and as long as Emiran does not get in the way of that, and does not openly turn against the prince, I have my way of dealing with Andon’s anxieties.” 

I looked at her for a moment. “I don’t suppose his wife has anything to do with that?”

Tyna’s mouth tightened. “No, I have other ways. Arabel and I… did not part well.” She waved a hand in the air, as if clearing away smoke, and looked back to me. “I wanted you to know which way the winds were blowing.” 

I held Veland against my side. “Thank you.” 

Tyna glanced down at Veland, and fumbled in her pocket for something. “Ah, here it is.” She pulled out a small notebook, bound in cheap leather. _“This is for you,”_ she said to Veland, _“for your lessons. Take good care of it.”_

Veland looked at the notebook for a moment, holding it in his hands, then he looked up at Tyna and nodded. _“Thank you, Auntie.”_

There was more activity around the Wolf-worshiper’s lodge, when we arrived. It appeared to be some kind of unofficial market day, as we passed small clusters of people arguing over the the prices of hides and firewood, which seemed to be the chief products. A number of the worshipers must make their living off the forest, I realized. It made sense—many if not all of the merchants closer to Morhall catered to Kressosi soldiers. None of them would welcome someone who associated with this place. 

A woman who could have been anywhere from forty to sixty approached us with a basket under her arm, looking particularly critically at me and Veland. “Ma Tyna,” she said in a gruff, low voice. “Got what you wanted.” 

The basket held a mess of roots and peeled bark that looked much the same to me, but Tyna turned through them carefully, and nodded, pulling her purse from her bodice and paying the woman with a price they must have already agreed to. “Thank you, I’ll be sure to seek you out again in the spring.” 

The woman grunted and cast another wary glance at me before turning away. 

“Her name is Brundis,” Tyna said, shaking out a cloth to lay over the top of the basket. “She’s an herbwoman. She was driven out of her home for witchcraft.” 

“And she came here?”

“Not at first, but it’s hard not to stay when they offer you a warm dry place to rest your feet and share what food they have.” Tyna led us into the lodge, calling out a hello that was answered by a handful of voices. “I have some patients to tend to,” she said.

I nodded. “Veland and I will find something to do.” 

“Ima,” Veland whispered, _“what is this place?”_

_“This is a place where people who worship White Wolf live,”_ I murmured. _“Lady Tyna tends to the sick here, and there is someone I must speak to.”_  
It wasn’t difficult to find Spider. She was tending the hearth, murmuring prayers over a bundle of herbs smoldering on the coals. I had Veland sit, and I knelt on one of the straw cushions to signal I was willing to wait. Spider looked askance at me, but she continued to murmur, turning the bundle so that it smoked and curled. The heady scent of the herbs was less strong where I knelt, but I didn’t have to guess at their purpose. She was banishing the spirits of sickness. 

After a time, she laid aside the blackened pole of fir that she used as a fire poker, and knelt across from me. Where I kept my hands to my knees, as I had been taught a woman was meant to, Spider knelt with her hands at the tops of her thighs, elbows pointed out, as a man would. “Is there something I can do for you, Cousin?”

I nodded. “Tell me what you need,” I said, “and I will get it for you.” 

#

The old palace library was a center of administrative activity, with straight-backed men in deep blue moving swiftly from place to place, and each seeming discomfited to notice my presence, both too Sarenn and too womanly to belong there. 

Muras was engaged in a meeting that I gathered was of some import, with his second and third in command, and which I knew I would not be permitted to interrupt. In an effort to be rid of my distracting presence, an officer named Arenda tried to persuade me that it would likely be a long meeting, that he could tell Commander Emiran I had been by. I told Arenda that I was a patient woman, and I would wait. 

It was perhaps an hour before the men resigned themselves to my presence, and some lowly young officer called Cero was charged with tending to my needs—in that he appeared perhaps every ten minutes to ask if I required a pillow for my chair, or a cup of tea or (luxury of luxuries) Aziran coffee with cinnamon, which I had not even known they bothered to export this far north. I wondered how they justified the expense to their colleagues in Kressos. 

I politely declined each, which seemed to put Cero into an ever greater distress, until I finally assented to a _small_ cup of coffee, provided there was a splash of milk and a spoonful of honey. Relieved to finally have a task, I had just received my porcelain cup when Muras emerged from the inner chamber where his meeting had been held. 

His eyes lit upon me for a moment, and I waved a hand, smiling softly and sipping at my coffee while he made a last few remarks to the men. Cero had been rather generous with the spoonful of honey. 

“Is everything alright?” Muras asked. 

“If it were an emergency, I would have interrupted,” I replied mildly. “May I speak to you in private?”

Muras gestured the now empty meeting room. I took my coffee with me, not willing to waste such an expensive drink. “How much does the army spend making sure you have access to coffee?” I asked as the door closed.

“I don’t keep the books, I wouldn’t pretend to know,” Muras said, pulling out a chair for me. “And what can I do for the lovely Mrs. Emiran?” he said, sitting down in the chair next to me. 

I wasn’t quick enough to hide my grimace. “I’m sorry,” Muras said, “I only meant to tease you.”

“I know,” I said, soft. I sipped at my coffee, and set it down. “I wanted to ask you about Morhall hosting a feast.” 

Muras looked at me curiously. “A feast.”

“One open to the public,” I said. “It’s traditional. It feeds the poor and cultivates good feeling.” I ran my thumb across the rim of the porcelain cup. “The men would have to be on their best behavior, of course.” 

Muras was quiet for a moment. “I think it would be unwise to mix alcohol into such an event.” 

I thought it unlikely that anyone could prevent alcohol from being present. “It wouldn’t be unexpected for a feast hosted by military men to have certain rules of conduct,” I replied. “Promise that excessive drunkenness will be harshly punished, that violence will not be tolerated—if anything you should punish your men most harshly, as they represent you. We have a long winter ahead of us. You are a new governor here. Now is when you show them just how you will govern this place.” 

Muras let out a breath, rubbed his face. “What did you have in mind?”


	10. X. Puppet and Puppeteer

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warning for implied child abuse, implied sexual assault, discussion of child death

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I will counsel you, and you would do well to learn—  
> Trust not the woman with a witch’s heart  
> Who speaks to ghosts and wolves   
> And dances on the barrow mound.
> 
> I will counsel you, and you would do well to learn—  
> Dust and ashes you will be,   
> To give your love to her who bewitches  
> And calls on gods with secret names. 
> 
> Sayings of the Lame God

I underestimated Liana Anarin. I watched her whispering in Emiran’s ear, and I didn’t wonder that Andon was so afraid. He was just afraid of the wrong person. What had Emiran survived, one brutal march to kill a king? Anarin was bred in the wolf’s den.

It was a clever thing, to talk Emiran into hosting a feast. If they had the money to spend on coffee, after all, then the coffers could accommodate soothing the tensions of the people. There was hardly a merchant or craftsman in the city that was not employed in the endeavor of building a public feast hall which could serve as neutral ground between soldier and civilian. There were a scant few weeks to make it a reality before the beginning of winter, and the harvest to be brought in as well. Morhall was busy. 

Much too busy for any trouble to break out. 

“What do you hope to gain from all this?” I asked her, while the feral little prince concentrated fiercely on practicing his letters. 

Anarin was embroidering a tunic for her son, small black hounds racing along the hem. Her dark eyes didn’t rise to meet mine. “A woman doesn’t need to act openly for everyone to recognize her handiwork.”

“Every man a dancing puppet and every woman the puppeteer,” I said. It was something Arabel had used to say, I had always liked the ring of it. 

Anarin said nothing. 

“I’ve never met someone who takes so little pleasure out of their manipulations,” I said, disliking her silence. I always disliked it when she was silent, when I could sense she was concealing her thoughts.

Anarin’s voice went icy. “Betrayal does not come easily to me.” She bent further over her embroidery, making small, tight stitches. 

“Do you think those men would share your loyalty, if they knew who you were?” I said it to provoke her, I confess. I couldn’t stand it, the yearning in her face when Emiran looked at her, the way she feared losing him. The mother of a king, and she chased after a Kressosi merchant’s son like a lovestruck scullery maid. 

She stuck her thumb with the needle and cursed loudly, making Veland jump. _“It’s alright, puppy,”_ she said quickly, stroking his hair while she pressed a spot of blood into her kerchief. _“Finish your page and you can go play.”_ When he set to work again, Anarin gave me a scowl over his head. “You may have chosen to live your life alone and friendless, Tyna, that does not mean I have to do the same.” 

That stung. “Would you choose them over your own people?”

“As long as I am the instrument the Wolf has chosen,” Anarin said firmly, “I will not let harm come to them because of me.” 

My mouth pulled tight. “Andon will have him killed.”

“Then I suppose you and I will have to greet that dawn on different sides of the battlefield,” Anarin replied. A soldier’s turn of phrase, if ever I had heard one. She had spent too much time with military men.

I couldn’t fathom how stubborn she was about this. Were it not for Emiran, Saren would still have been free. He and Haris both had Sarenn blood on their hands. Blood that would have been hers, but for her escape.

_“Ima, I’m finished,”_ Veland said, sitting straighter.

Anarin looked over his work and kissed his forehead. _“Don’t get into too much trouble. You’ll need a bath before dinner.”_ _  
_

_“Yes, Ima.”_ Veland kissed his mother’s cheek and took off. 

Anarin rubbed her stuck finger with a crease between her eyebrows, and bent back to her embroidery. I began to pack up my things, thinking my time would be better spent making myself useful somewhere. 

“My father thought he was doing me a kindness,” Anarin said. “Of course, he couldn’t have said no.” She didn’t look up, carefully stitching her hounds. _“That’s the problem with kings, isn’t it? You can’t refuse them. And who will want you if you divorce him, the woman who couldn’t be satisfied with her place?”_

I stopped packing, and listened. 

_“A daughter shouldn’t disobey her father,”_ Anarin said quietly, _“a wife her husband, a subject her king. So what do you call it, when she doesn’t want to go to bed with the man she married, even though she must?”_

In Azira, they would have called it rape. In Azira, she could have used the charge to be allowed to return to her parents home, a divorce granted in her absence, and given a fund to support her and her children for a time. It was not perfect, but it was better than nothing at all. 

“I have been alone for seven years.” Anarin broke the thread, picked up a new one. “My father died and I did not know it. Separated from my sons because I knew I could not care for them.  Every time I have glimpsed solid ground where I might build a life where I could be content, it has been pulled out from underneath me.” 

Anarin gazed off at the window, a stray strand of black hair against her cheek. “This isn’t a life I would have chosen for myself, but it’s what I have. You won’t shame me for it.” 

I sunk my fingers into the cloth of my physician’s bag. “I don’t mean to shame you,” I said in a low voice. “I am—impatient.”

Finally, Anarin looked at me. I met her gaze. “The way forward has never seemed more clear to me, and you dig your heels in at every chance you get.” 

Anarin gave a small smile. “And you push whenever you have the opportunity. Just because I am not moving according to your plans, doesn’t mean I am not moving, Tyna.” 

I searched her face. “Hence the feast.”

She inclined her head. “Seems a good hobby for the commander’s mistress, doesn’t it? Keeps her out of trouble.” 

“Perhaps.” As long as Emiran believed that, who was I to say different? It was lucky Anarin was discreet with her influence over the man. Men who were afraid of a woman’s influence were very often men who killed that woman. 

Andon, I knew, was such a man. A weak and paranoid man who saw traitors in every shadow, who leapt at the chance to bring an assassin into his fold at the same time that he was constantly afraid I would kill him myself. I had spent years assuring him of my loyalty, cultivating my place at the prince’s side as carefully as I cultivated my nightshades. I smoothed over his fears when there was need, and when one of those people he feared became inconvenient to me, or to his wife, I fed the flames until he set me to my task. 

Every man a dancing puppet. Arabel had always known what I was capable of, if she did not believe I ever meant to kill Andon. She had her own ends, sometimes they aligned with mine. What I had liked about her was the clever spark in her eyes, and the smell of mint in her thick dark curls. The sound of her laugh.

I had delivered her children, nursed them through childhood fevers and injuries. They ran to me as often as their nurse. Isac and Katarin and little Jesa. 

If I was impatient with Anarin, it was because she had already done what I had not. She had broken a kingdom, and brought it to its knees. I knew in my gut she could do it again, that she could break Kressos as she had broken Saren—if she would just try.

But I had had ample opportunity to poison near the whole royal family, and I had not, because of Arabel, and Isac, and Katarin, and little Jesa. 

#

It suited me well, that no one asked me why the physician who was ostensibly there to attend to the commander instead spent her days going out into the city and tending to the poor. Certainly, I knew it didn’t bother Emiran in the least that I was outside of the castle, away from himself, his lover and his mistress. We exchanged few words, the commander and I, but I knew he mistrusted the easing of tensions between myself and Lya. He believed I must be deceiving her about something. 

The lodge where the Wolf folk had made their home held many who were not especially fervent believers. It was clever, I supposed, to take in anyone who would find hospitality nowhere else, but it meant they were always in need. 

Before I left each morning, I filled a basket with whatever I could take from the kitchens. Some of the senior cooks were Kressosi, and disdained what I was about, but those they ordered about were Sarenn, and many of them poor themselves. One woman, prematurely aged by a life of never-ending hard work, had taken to preparing a stash of leftovers and scraps in advance of my arrival. 

That morning I was taking the bones of last nights dinner, wrapped in waxed paper so that the scraps of meat still clinging them would not dirty the inside of my basket. They could be boiled for soup, along with the uneaten roasted vegetables. I had even managed to steal a small bag of black grain rice, which would stretch even the thinnest of soups. Regular meals would cure half the ills that plagued them. 

I left the basket with Spider, who served as the mistress of the lodge, nodding at her as she added wood to the fire. Then I went to the beds, to begin what I always did—work my way down one side, and then the other. 

I had used to do work like this in Ekhum. It was required of more advanced students, to work in the hospitals that served the poor. It was not so different here, except that it was a trial to keep them warm, rather than a trial to keep them cool enough. I washed limbs and backs blistered with sores, Spider bringing me hot water to clean the rags. I replaced blankets, piling the ones damp with sweat and a number of less pleasant things into a sack, which I would take to the laundress at the end of my work.

Poultices applied, tinctures spooned down the throat, oils and balms smeared over blisters, cuts washed and covered. My back ached from stooping over beds. 

I washed my hands in a bowl by the fire, shoulders slumped. I wished Basim were with me. I needed someone level-headed, someone I trusted. 

“I had a dream again,” Spider said, stirring the soup pot. “Of a young fawn nursed by a black wolf.” 

I glanced at her. “I don’t parse dreams.” I didn’t have Anarin’s mystical tendencies. I knew what powers existed in Saren, and I knew enough to keep well away from them. 

Spider shrugged her shoulders. “A stag raised by a wolf would be a ferocious thing.” 

I was not entirely convinced that Spider was completely sane. I dried my hands, and scooped up the bag of blankets. “Ketil should be moved closer to the fire, and make sure any water someone drinks is boiled. Alfdis may need help getting to the latrine.” 

Spider nodded, and said nothing more to me. 

The air was cool when I stepped out into the street, the first bite of autumn on the wind. I wasn’t looking forward to my first winter this far north. How Anarin could speak of it without dread I didn’t know. Long hours of dark, ice coating everything, the wind howling at all hours—it seemed absurd anyone would willingly live here. Just the thought made me want to curl in front of a fire with a bearskin about my shoulders. 

My back and shoulders ached by the time I reached the laundry house, and I only just had enough coins in my purse to pay the bill. I thought ruefully that I would have to ask Anarin for money, as I was unlikely to get anything extra out of Morhall’s coffers beyond the wages Emiran was obligated to pay me for my upkeep. 

As I made my way back to the castle, I heard a whistle from a window above me. A woman leaned out, straw gold hair spilling over her shoulders. Her name was Ania, and she was only a little younger than myself. “Come and visit me today?” she called, smiling.

I smiled back at her, tired. “I don’t have the money today,” I said, “but maybe tomorrow.” Her bed smelled like pine, her skin like milk soap and sweat. I wouldn’t have minded spending my afternoon with her. 

“I’ll be waiting,” Ania teased, and ducked back into her window. 

Somehow I felt worse for having seen her. I should have taken the next road, I thought, but the one that ran in front of the tavern was the shortest route, and all I had thought of was my sore feet. 

#

I used to sing, when I made medicines. Basim had always found it amusing, listening to me while I ground herbs. “You always sing such joyful songs,” he said, “and I’ve never known a more serious woman.” 

“You’re less serious than I ever imagined a poisoner to be,” I countered.   
I came to his house to do my work, away from the noise of the university. I needed quiet, and Basim’s house—with the exception of Basim himself—provided that peace. 

“The murderous aspect of my career is long gone, I fear,” Basim said, “now I’m nothing more than a kitchen manager and personal attendant for a man wealthy enough to have enemies.” He said it as if he was resentful, which I knew he wasn’t. Basim could be content nearly anywhere, he was the sort of person who drifted on the wind and put down roots wherever he fell, only to pull them up again at the next breeze. 

I was not that person. In Basim’s measure, I was as restless as a crane, which flew thousands of miles each year to travel from spring nesting site, to summer feeding ground, to winter home. I had to be in motion, or at least to have my eyes on the destination. At that moment, in the garden in Ekhum, my destination was to return to Saren a proper physician, to perform surgeries in the wakes of battles and ease the pain with the same herbs Alvild had taught me to find, prepare, and dispense. I wanted to ease suffering. 

I had a vague notion, then, that there was a war, but there was always a war. I believed naively that eventually the bloody Kressosi tide would break hard against the rocks of a Sarenn winter, and fall back, as it always did. I did not know the name Liana Anarin then, and had I, I wouldn’t have known to give it any significance. There were always too many princesses, with too many children, who would go off to marry the children of lords who would never amount to much in their relation to the king’s chosen heir. 

All I thought of then was how every person with the Tyna name was scattered to the wind, and I was the one who meant to return, to dig my claws into the earth and refuse to budge. 

If I was as restless as the white cranes that spent their winters in Ekhum, it was only because my nesting ground had been stolen from me. 

#

I was hardly within Morhall when Veland darted behind me, clinging to my skirts and peering out from behind my legs. I opened my mouth to demand to know what he was up to, but I was interrupted. 

“You little rat!” A soldier rounded the corner, face flushed red, a horse whip clutched in his fist. Veland hid his face and dug his fists tighter into my skirts. 

I laid a hand on his head, staring coolly at the soldier. He was a touch old, for a footman, and I didn’t miss the odor of stale alcohol. “What is the matter, soldier?” 

“That little beast spit in my eye,” the footman snarled. “Give him here.”

“No.”

The man blinked stupidly at me, the way men who are not used to women telling them ‘no’ often do. I held Veland close to my side. “You cannot be so foolish,” I said calmly, “as to think I would be party to allowing you to beat Commander Emiran’s step-son.” 

The man stared at me, and then at Veland, dumbfounded. Then he scoffed. “That little Sarenn bastard?” 

He meant to say more, I think, but I stepped forward and grasped his collar in a fist, twisting it so that it choked him. The man sputtered, and discovered with some alarm that I was not weak-limbed. “I know,” I said, my voice still cool, “that you cannot be so foolish as to think I won’t drag you in front of the commander, and report to him that you threatened his step-son.” 

The man’s face went ashen grey, and he struggled to get out of my grasp—but my arms had put saws through bone. I glanced down at Veland, who had fallen back. _“Come along, child,”_ I said _“we’re going to take care of this.”_

Veland looked between the two of us, and held onto my skirt with one hand as I marched the humiliated and choking soldier down the corridor. 

_“Tell me why you spit in his eye.”_

Veland glowered at the man from the far side of me. _“The others are scared of him.”  
_

_“The other children?”_ I tightened my grip on the soldier’s collar when he squirmed. For good measure I grasped his ear with my free hand. 

Veland nodded.

_“Why are they scared of him?”_ I pressed.

Veland shook his head, and that was not an answer I liked at all. Reticence in a child rarely meant anything good. I spied a young officer further down the corridor. He noticed me in the next moment, and looked suitably alarmed. 

“Where is Commander Emiran?” I snarled. 

The officer began to stammer, thought better of it, and simply waved for me to follow. I glanced down at Veland and found his face in a concentrated frown. Serious, I thought, like his mother. 

The young officer darted into the offices ahead of me, and Emiran got as much warning of my arrival as he was going to get. 

He took in the soldier, gasping for breath and captured squarely in my grasp, and Veland holding fast to my skirt. I twisted the soldier’s ear. “Do tell the good commander,” I said, “what you meant to do with that horse whip when I found you.” 

“S-sir,” the soldier stammered. “It isn’t what—” I twisted further, and the soldier gave a pathetic cry. 

“Lady Tyna,” Emiran said, the last thread of his patience with me straining, “I would like to hear the reason for this spectacle.” 

“I would like to know why you employ men who would take a whip to a seven year old boy!” 

Emiran’s eyes again flicked to Veland, and his jaw tightened. “Please release him, Lady Tyna.” 

I did so, letting the pestilential man stand up, rubbing his throat and his ear. 

Emiran could have nailed the soldier to the wall with his stare. “Mr…?”

“Ah—Chirus, sir—”

“Mr. Chirus,” Emiran said, “would you like to explain yourself, or shall Lady Tyna do it for you?” 

I knelt in front of Veland while Chirus tried to give any defense. “Veland,” I murmured, _“if he has hurt any of the children, it’s very important that you tell me.”_

Veland stared at me with his mother’s grave dark eyes. _“I don’t know what he does,”_ he said, _“but they told me to keep away from him.”  
_

_“So you spit in his eye?”_   
_  
_

_“He was trying to get me to go with him. He wouldn’t leave me alone.”_

I looked over at Emiran. Perhaps he guessed from the look on my face that something was very, very wrong. “Lady Tyna, if you’ll please wait with Veland in the next room, I’ll come speak to you in a moment.”

I nodded, taking Veland’s hand. Veland looked back over his shoulder as we left, and then up to me. _“I want my ima.”_

I looked to one of the office clerks, grasping his arm to get his attention. “Please find Mrs. Emiran and bring her here. Tell her her son is fine, but he wants to see her.” The last thing Anarin needed was for someone to terrify her. 

“Yes, milady.” The clerk nodded and hurried off. I shut the door behind myself and Veland. Gods, I felt so tired. 

Emiran appeared a few minutes later. He looked Veland over carefully, and then turned to me. “What did he say?”

“He told me the other children are scared of Chirus,” I said, “that they warned Veland to stay away from him, so when Chirus approached him—and tried to get him alone—that’s when Veland spit in his eye and ran.” 

Emiran let out a slow breath. “And you found him?”

“If you can call abruptly having a child hiding in your skirts finding him, I suppose so.” I folded my arms. “I sent for his mother.” 

Emiran nodded. “He’s alright, otherwise?”

“Seems to be.” I gazed at Emiran. “He meant to hurt that boy, one way or another.”

Emiran was looking at Veland, and not at me. “Leave Chirus to me. I’m sure I can find a more suitable job to keep him occupied over the winter.” 

The door flew open and Anarin swept past us both to her son, cupping his face in her hands. “What happened? Are you hurt?”

Veland squirmed. “Ima—”

“He’s fine,” I said. “He asked for you. I told that stupid officer to tell you he was alright—”

“Be quiet!” Anarin snarled at me. 

I took a step back. 

Veland leaned into his mother’s hug, pressing his face into her shoulder. “What the hell happened?” Anarin whispered, a hand on the back of his head. 

“Lady Tyna,” Emiran said softly, “if you would give us a moment.” 

I gathered all my tired bones up, and nodded. “I’ll be in my chambers, if anyone needs me.” 

#

As a poisoner, I worked for Mahmed Abbas. In Saren we would have called him a merchant, but he was much more than that. He controlled vast lengths of trade route between Azira and Ekhum, and though his main interests were in Luon silks and jade, he dabbled also in perfume, horses and zebras, and Sarenn ivory and furs. 

It was by the return of the ivory that I knew the war was over. It was with the return of the ivory that I learned what had occurred at Morhall. 

Children ripped from their mothers arms to be slaughtered, they said. Some princesses gave their children poison rather than let them fall into Kressosi hands. The king killed in his bedchamber, and buried without his head. Slaughter and blood, and Saren’s freedom lost. 

I managed to hold myself together until Master Abbas dismissed me for the day, and then in the privacy of my chambers I wept until the breath burned in my throat and I could not feel my face. I thought of Alvild, of the children I had delivered and the mothers I had been midwife to. Anyone I might have called family, when I had none. 

I was sick for days, unable to pull myself from bed. Basim heard what had happened, and came to see me. He ripped the curtains back from my windows, threw the glass open to admit the breeze, and forced me to eat, and to bathe. “You have accomplished too much to let the death of a king destroy you,” he told me. “You are a poisoner. Act like one.” 

Basim set me in the right direction, and that was all he did. It was mine to resign from my place in Master Abbas’ house, to sell what few valuables I had to prepare for my journey back around the cape. I bought passage on a Kressosi ship, and styled my hair in a Kressosi fashion. I brought out my old physicians clothes from when I worked at the university, the stain-disguising brown with the black stripe down the arm. A physician, a poisoner—little enough difference between the two, except in our goals. 

On the voyage I made sure to practice my speech, so that my Sarenn accent was hardly noticeable. I studied the Kressosi crew as closely as I studied my patients, the way they spoke to each other, to me, to women who were not Sarenn. I gathered myself, and I waited. 

Landfall in Kressos left me with a new project, to find my way where I needed to be. I started simply enough—an Aziran trained physician is a prize. A lord who was close to the throne was happy to snatch me up. I spent half a year tending to his arthritic joints before I had the opportunity to meet a member of the royal family. 

A ball was no event for a physician, except when a mishap had someone cutting their palm open on a broken glass. Picking shards out of her hand, carefully cleaning the blood and binding her palm—that was how I met Princess Arabel, who spoke with me about my training, about my family, and who went back to her husband to speak about me. 

Anarin might agree with me, that you can’t refuse a crown prince any more than you can refuse a king. Prince Andon walked away that night with a new physician and poisoner, and I found my footing in a land that had always wanted me dead. 

#

I must have slept, uncomfortably on the divan, because I woke up to Anarin knocking on my door. I rubbed my eyes before I opened it, and let her into my modest chambers. I wasn’t certain how Anarin had known where to find me. 

“I suppose I should thank you,” she said, not looking directly at me.

“Where’s Veland?” I asked. 

Anarin folded her arms in front of her, almost as if she were trying to shake off a chill. “Sleeping. I suppose he wore himself out. I left him with Muras.” 

Of course she did. The only woman brave enough to leave her son with the man who had murdered his father, and all his brothers and sisters. 

“Muras has sent that man to a miserable little garrison about five miles off,” Anarin said. “He’ll not come back, as long as Muras is commander here.” She was looking off into the distance, as if she could see the garrison now, and was envisioning an untimely death for Chirus.

“Hmm.” I remembered, as the silence grew awkward, what I had meant to ask. “I need to ask a favor of you.”

Anarin’s dark eyes met mine, and finally it seemed she was actually in the room with me. “Oh?”

“I’ve been paying to take the blankets at the lodge to the laundress every few days,” I told her. “It’s not good for the sick to lay in dirty blankets. It’s damned costly to keep them clean, though. I’ve run out of extra money.” 

Anarin nodded. “How much do you need?” 

“Thirty copper pieces will get me through the next month, I think.” And a little extra, for Ania. 

“I’ll see that you get it,” Anarin said. “Is there anything else I can do?”  
I paused, and nodded. “If you can slip away at night,” I said, “you should come when the moon is full.” 

Anarin considered me in silence for a moment, and nodded. “I’ll think about it.”


	11. Root

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter warning for implied sexual assault, poisoning, and description of surgery

The elk had gone into rut, and so every bull in twenty miles was screaming, and Anarin’s demon was wilder than ever. Often as not, when I set out to leave in the morning the beast had broken out of the stables and was wreaking havoc in the courtyard, charging the stablehands who were attempting to catch him before he got to the pen of heat-stricken cows. 

Anarin would walk out, whistle, and the stinking, lust-ridden elk would settle and snort resentfully, and be led back to the stable until the next morning. Anarin seemed unbothered by the chaos Bili created, she had other concerns.

I was still helping with Veland’s lessons. He was frustrated, but determined, and was starting to be able to ask for things in Sarenn. I had noticed he was picking up some Kressosi as well, though neither his mother nor I were actively teaching him. Naturally, what he was picking up from the other children was largely profanities, which I quietly advised him he shouldn’t repeat around his mother. Some mothers might not mind that their children swore as well as any footman, but I had my doubts that Lya was one of them. 

Strangely, the boy seemed to have grown attached to me. I didn’t know why, I certainly didn’t go out of my way to entertain him. More than once I caught him trying to follow me on my trips out to the lodge, and sent him back into the castle with a firm swat. I would not be responsible for his getting himself into serious trouble outside of Morhall. 

My other shadow was more difficult to shake. 

Haris knew I could see him tailing me, and I knew he didn’t care. Let me know that I was watched, what mattered was that I couldn’t get rid of him. I took my basket of scraps to the lodge, and I worked as Haris leaned up alongside the door, arms folded, gazing steadily at me through the gloom. 

_“Who is this?”_ Spider asked me, her eyes narrowed at Haris. 

_“He is one of Commander Emiran’s men,”_ I said, putting down a squash I had stolen whole from the kitchens when the matrons were not looking. _“It seems the commander is suspicious about what I get up to.”_

I began my rounds as usual, asking each person how they were doing, inspecting their recovery. There was a face I didn’t recognize, a young man pale with fever who was sweating in a bed that had previously been occupied by a new mother. He was very, very ill—and it didn’t take me long to diagnose the problem. 

I dragged Spider over by the arm, lifting the blanket to gesture to the boy’s wounded leg, which gave off an unmistakable odor. _“Why didn’t you send someone to tell me of this? How long has he been here?”  
_

_“Only since last night,”_ Spider told me. _“His father brought him in, he had been concealing the seriousness of the injury.”  
_

_“I need to remove the leg as soon as possible. Have someone hang blankets in that corner,”_ I said, gesturing to the back of the lodge. _“We need to move him there so I can operate without distressing the others.”_ I cursed myself for not anticipating something like this, and dug furiously through my kit bag, praying I had everything. 

“Mr. Haris!” I barked, jerking the blanket off of the boy. “I need your assistance.”

Haris stared at me for a moment before he began to move, and I saw the moment in his face when he saw what I had seen. The wound was rotten, and poisoning his blood. “I’ll get his arms,” Haris said, not needing to be told.  
I grasped the legs, and the boy yelped, but I had no time to be gentle with him. We moved him onto a table in that back corner, and I handed Haris a pair of scissors. “Cut the bandages off of him.” I took a rag from my kit and elixir of poppy. A dab and nothing more, I pressed the cloth over the young man’s face and waited for his eyes to roll back, dazed. 

I made sure the blankets were up so that we could not be seen by the entire lodge, and pulled my saw from its leather case. I wiped the blade in pure alcohol, and looked up to find Haris gazing grimly at me. “He’s sedated, but that doesn’t mean he won’t fight,” I said. “Find another two or three men to help you hold him down.” 

Haris left me, and I had never been much of a praying woman, but I knew the wards against the spirits of death as well as my own name. I prayed quietly and quickly over the boy, as I scrubbed my hands clean in hot water and tied a tourniquet above his knee. Stupid boy, if he had sought treatment sooner, I might have been able to save his leg. 

Haris returned with three men who paled when I lifted my saw. _“Quickly now,”_ I instructed them. _“We don’t have a moment to spare.”_

I had always hated this. 

The boy screamed when I started to cut. I worked hard and fast, hot blood soaking the front of my dress, speckling my face. He had lost consciousness by the time I was done, stitching skin back over the place where his knee had once been and hissing prayers under my breath that it was not too late. 

I washed his blood from my hands and face, and set to preparing one of my few syringes. They were costly items, even in Azira, and I treated them with great care. They would be nearly impossible to replace in Saren. 

The other men had retreated as soon as they were able, but Haris was still there when I turned. He watched as I felt for the vein in the boy’s elbow, and injected him with a medicine I would not be able to replicate in Saren, and had been saving for a situation as dire as this. It was said to clean the blood, and prevent infection from spreading. I let out a breath. 

“Have you done many of these?” Haris asked. 

I glanced up at him, running water through the syringe. I would have to boil it later, but for now, I just wanted it rinsed. “Azira is not without its bloody conflicts,” I said. “I would have been considered a piss poor physician, if I couldn’t do this.” I looked away. “As it is, he may yet die.” 

“How was he injured?”

“I don’t know.” I laid aside the syringe and turned to the leg with its fouled wound, pushing back the rotten flesh. “Looks like a gunshot,” I said, and let it hang in the air between us. Sarenn people were no longer permitted to own rifles, only muskets for hunting. The difference between a bullet and a musketball would mean everything.

I dug my iron pincers into the wound, and found what I was looking for lodged in the bone. I prized it out, the bullet black with dead flesh. 

Haris said nothing. 

I dropped the bullet into the bowl of water I washed my hands in, and wrapped the leg in a length of worn old cloth. I called to Henric, a beardless man who said little, and asked him to take the leg out into the woods and bury it. “He won’t be needing it anymore.”

I sat, to catch my breath. I had further rounds to do, but I could not face them, not just yet. 

I was surprised to find Haris wiping up blood around the boy, a grim set to his mouth. “I suppose you’re going to tell Lya about this.”

I watched him carefully. “If she asks me why I’m covered in blood, I’m not going to lie to her.” 

“She hasn’t been the same since you joined up with us,” Haris said in a low voice. “Now she talks about wolf gods and blood debts, she has Muras believing in ghosts and prophets—”

“And you think I have something to do with it?” I said. “That I’m stirring up trouble with her to drive the commander mad?” 

“She was never like this before.” Haris wouldn’t look at me. 

“Or maybe you didn’t know her like you thought you did,” I said, losing my patience. “Do you think I was sent to drive a wedge between Emiran and his mistress? If the prince wanted her gone, I have much more direct ways of making that happen.” I stood and yanked one of the blankets down. “You Kressosi,” I muttered, “you don’t believe in monsters, so you start seeing them in people, instead.” 

#

Haris made an unwelcome nuisance of himself for as long as I worked in the lodge that day. I did my best to ignore him, though I was furious. This was what Anarin wanted so badly to protect? This image of herself as a woman without bite, the kind of woman a Kressosi officer could take in without fear? 

Haris didn’t deserve her, nor Emiran. They were nothing more than footmen in the game of fate, and Anarin a commander. It mattered nothing to the freedom of Saren whether these men lived or died, but everything—I knew in my gut—hung on Anarin using what she had been given. She was the spark to light the fire. 

If a few Kressosi men had to burn, then so be it. 

We did not speak to each other as I returned to Morhall, although Haris no longer felt the need to follow me at a distance. I thought I should have stayed to tend to the young man, but they could not afford to feed me at the lodge, and as it was—he would either live through the night or he wouldn’t. There was nothing I could do about it. 

The gates were open, and Anarin was in the saddle when I saw her, sitting high and proud, her demon snorting and scraping at the stones with his hooves, antlers swinging dangerously wide. She noticed myself and Haris, and I saw the wariness in her gaze. 

The elk lifted his head and screamed, and Anarin did not even look at him as she pulled on the reins and brought him under control. “What the hell happened?” she asked, pulling the beast around so she could look at me, still covered in blood. 

“I took a man’s leg off,” I said. “It had gone rotten, after he was shot with a rifle.” 

Anarin gazed at me for a moment, and then her demon tried to shake off the reins again. She pulled them sharply back, and turned her gaze to Haris. “I’m going out for a ride. I’ll be back as soon as Bili’s too exhausted to get into trouble.” She held the beast to a firm walk out the gates, which gave me time to climb the castle walls, and watch as she reached the empty fields, and in a moment dig her heels into the elk’s flanks and fall low as he gave a great bellow, reared, and took off at a gallop. 

The night I first met Anarin she had been as shy as a mouse, withdrawn into herself almost completely. What Haris saw now, what he blamed me for, was the true woman emerging from the mask. This was Liana Anarin, half-wild and powerful. I would have loved to take credit for midwifing that into the world, but it was not my doing. 

I took in a deep breath of crisp air, tinged with smoke. I was born in the foothills of the mountains, where the trees grew so tall and thick as to block out the sky in the deep forest. This frostbitten place was not my home, but it was the seat of power, once. 

Where the war ended, it will begin again. That was what Anarin had told me, wasn’t it? We were all alone here, her and I, the only people who might be loyal to us the sick, the beggar, and the bed-warmer. 

Haris was still watching me, when I turned to descend. I met his gaze, and came down the steps, balancing my bag against my hip. 

“You ought to leave her alone,” Haris said in a low voice. 

I cocked my head to the side. “I’m the midwife attending her pregnancy, Mr. Haris,” I said. “Until such time as she chooses to replace me, I can hardly abandon her.” 

“You know what I mean.” Haris gave me the look a guard dog gives to a stranger who’s about to get too close. “You weren’t the only one with an ear to palace rumor and gossip.” 

He turned away from me then. I watched him go, and marveled at the thought that someone believed me such a seductress I could steal away a woman so reluctant to trust me. It seemed Haris was more attached to her than I had previously believed. Or maybe, he only wanted to protect her for Emiran’s sake. I hadn’t observed the man closely enough to tell which. 

Perhaps I should have paid better attention. 

#

Alvild showed me the flat yellow flowers, shaped like golden buttons, when I was just ten. “You may need these someday,” she told me. “They bring on bleeding, so that you don’t get with child. Every woman of a certain age knows how to make the tea. It’s what keeps them from being overrun with more children than they can care for, and foolish men none the wiser.” 

I had played among those flowers with other children in the village, and never noticed them. Now I knew their name— _tansy_ —and I knew what they could do. I whispered their names when I touched their leaves, asking if I was permitted to take some for Alvild’s medicines. I could tell their answer by whether or not the flowers and leaves separated from the stalk easily. Alvild taught me how to harvest the herbs she needed, so that it would be as if I had never been there at all. 

“Each plant is a god,” she told me. “Treat it with the respect it is owed. It can choose to lend you its gifts, or it can refuse. If you honor them, they will tell you their secrets.” 

I spent my childhood whispering to the mushrooms that grew when it rained. In one basket, I would put the ones that Alvild used for medicines, and in the other, I would put those that could be sold for food. Alvild inspected each basket carefully when I brought them back, but I had a keen eye, and she only rarely found fault with my ability to tell them apart. The money that I made would pay for fabric to make a new dress when I grew too tall for the one I wore, and the old one Alvild would trade to the mother of a younger girl, in exchange for something she needed. 

I went barefoot in the forest, as silent as a doe. In the summer I filled my basket with berries, until my hands were stained red and purple. Autumn would come, and I would pick apples beginning to ferment on the tree, and prize the roots of dandelions from the earth. 

Strange, that I never thought of it as work. If there was anything I considered a chore, it was tending the fire, as I did near constantly between the first snow of autumn and the first budding of spring, when the only things growing in the forest were the unborn offspring of the animals. My task was to keep Alvild’s home clean, the fire hot, and a pot of water ever boiling in the pot over the coals. 

The first birth I ever attended was that of a woman who came to Alvild in the thick of a snowstorm. I had seen her around the village, I knew she was the blacksmith’s second wife. I didn’t realize until I was older how young she was, only nineteen or so. The first wife loathed her, and so instead of sending for Alvild, the girl had come to us, so that she could be sure her baby would be safe until she was well enough to return. 

I remember how soft Alvild’s voice was as she helped the woman to the end of the bed, where she knelt on a thick mat. Alvild instructed me to move the water pot to the side, but keep it near the fire so it would still be warm when the baby was born. 

I watched Alvild carefully, the way she told the woman to move around to wherever she was most comfortable, how she wiped the sweat from the woman’s brow and how gentle she was with her. 

Two boys were born that night, twins, with thin patches of soft copper red hair atop their brown heads. Alvild washed them in warm water and wrapped them in soft blankets. We put them in a basket by the fire, so they wouldn’t catch a chill, while Alvild helped the woman clean up, and scooped the afterbirth into a bowl, so it could be buried at her husband’s house. 

Anyone else would have rejoiced at twin boys, but not this woman. She stared at them with something like fear. “She’ll kill them,” the woman whispered to Alvild. Her husband’s first wife had born only two daughters, and only one of them had survived infancy. “I know she will.” 

“She will not,” Alvild said, pressing a small bottle into the woman’s hand. “Because you will give her this.” 

I didn’t know, then, what it was. A few days later, after the new mother had returned home, the first wife took gravely ill. She came to Alvild to be treated, and Alvild sent me out for firewood. By the time I came back, the first wife was dead. 

The strain of walking in the snow with her illness, Alvild said. That was all.

#

I was afraid of what I would find, when I returned to the lodge the next day. The young man whose leg I had removed was laid out on a bed, breathing shallowly. I laid the back of a hand to his forehead, and felt with relief that he was not feverish. I carefully inspected the area around the wound, and was pleased to have no problem changing the bandages. He might live, after all. 

A stir drew my attention to the doors, where I saw Anarin stepping inside. She was dressed more plainly than she usually was in Morhall, and most surprisingly—she was alone. 

I watched her stop at the first bed, asking the name of the sick woman who lay there. She sat next to the woman, and just talked with her. I carried on with my rounds, and allowed myself to feel cautious hope at the improved condition of several of my patients. Winter would make things harder for them, if I could just have them close to wellness before then…

I reached the bed where Anarin was still sitting, listening to Denna tell Anarin about her home. “…it was always so beautiful there, in the mountains… I miss the rock deer, sometimes.” 

Anarin glanced up at me. “Lady Tyna.” 

“Miss Sargis, Denna,” I said, nodding. “How’s your gut today, Denna?” 

“Better, milady,” Denna said, her frail hands resting on her middle. “I’m quite tired, though…”

“That’s to be expected,” I assured her. “In a day or two, it should pass. You need the rest for your body to heal. May I borrow Miss Sargis for a moment?” I took Anarin aside, lowering my voice so we could speak privately. “How did you manage to get here without an escort?”

She gave me a small smile and glanced away. “No one knows I’m gone. I wanted people to be able to speak freely to me. Or, at least, more free than they would with a soldier hanging on to my shadow.” Anarin hugged her arms across her middle. “The young man who was shot…”

“He may yet live,” I said, looking back at the bed where he lay. ‘He will need careful treatment, but—he lived through the night.” 

Anarin nodded, seeming apprehensive. “I—I tried to ask around about who might have shot him.” She let out a breath. “I was told there was a—oh what word did that pompous ass use—an _altercation_ between a handful of soldiers and supposed ‘militants,’ and that was likely when it happened.” Her mouth pressed in a thin line. 

“And which pompous ass was that?” I asked. 

“Some idiot who works in the central offices,” Anarin muttered. “Couldn’t wait to be rid of me. Muras was out at the time, I didn’t want him to ask why I was there.” She put a hand to her face, sighed, and let it fall. “I was going to go to the feast hall after this, see how things are coming along. Would you come with me?”

The invitation surprised me. I gestured the beds. “I have work to finish here, first, but after—certainly. Someone has to keep you out of trouble.”

Anarin smiled a little. “Is there some way I can help you?” 

“If you’ve a strong stomach, then yes, I think so.” 

Anarin helped me to wash wounds and faces, introducing herself to each person we came to, smiling and chatting with them as we worked. She never flinched at their wounds, never recoiled from their sickness. She did wash her hands very carefully. 

“Where is your son, by the by?” I asked, handing her a cloth to dry her hands. 

“I told him to race Bili around the fields until he was exhausted,” Anarin said. “They both have too much energy.” She tucked a stray bit of hair behind her ear. “And no one will get close to him as long as he’s in the saddle.” 

I shook my head. “Quite the nurse you have.” 

I picked up my things and we said our goodbyes, after I checked on the young man one last time. Still breathing, still cool to the touch. 

Anarin wore a shawl around her shoulders, picking her way carefully through the muddy streets. We kept close together—it was never wise for a woman to walk alone in a city full of soldiers. If I was safer, it was only because of the physician’s stripe on my clothing that told everyone exactly who I was, and who would make sure my death was answered for. 

Mud clung to our hems, weighing us down. When the freeze came, I thought, at least the ground would be solid again. 

“I have to figure out how to compensate the boy and his family,” Anarin said, when we had been silent for a while.

I glanced at her. “How do you mean to do that?” 

She sucked in a breath. “I can’t go spending all of Muras’ money forever. But I have to do something.” 

I studied her for a moment. “That’s what this feast is about, isn’t it? You’re letting everyone know who really commands Morhall.” 

Anarin didn’t look at me. “Not telling them. Just giving them the opportunity to choose.” She adjusted her shawl, pulling it a little closer. “No dreams or magic tricks will make a true friend. You need to give them a reason to trust you.” 

We were passed by a wagon weighed down with boards for the roof of the feast hall, so freshly cut that they still smelled of sharp pitch. The hall came into view shortly after that, a long straight lodge of heavy timber, the skeleton beams of the roof still showing. Anarin circled around, taking it in with a critical eye. “This will be the main door,” she told me, gesturing to an unfinished wall. “I have carpenters presenting me with designs, competing for the commission.” 

She led me inside, showing me where the tables would stand, where the smoke vents would be. There, the side doors, there, the wing for the latrine. One thing caught my eye. “Does the commander have anything to say about there not being a dais for the foremost table?” 

Anarin tucked her arms across her chest. “What makes you think he’s had the leisure time to keep tabs on his mistress’ latest project, beyond the finances?” She considered the area, and turned, gesturing the ceiling. “There won’t be time for it to be done before the beginning of winter, but there can be banners hanging. I haven’t settled on designs, yet.” 

“Quite a feat,” I said, watching the men work. “It seems like you’ve employed half the city.” 

“Hmm.” Anarin put her fingertips to her lips, taking it all in. “It’s good to have something to do,” she said, soft. “Otherwise I’d go mad.” 

I watched the men working on the roof. “Are you losing sleep?”

“No,” she said. “I have my ways around that.” 

“No more… nighttime wanderings, then?” 

“Not outside of the castle, anyway.” She hugged her arms across her chest. “No one can ask me what I’m looking for, in the middle of the night.” 

“What are you looking for?” 

Anarin turned away from me. “I’m ghost-haunted, Lady Tyna,” she said, “that’s all.” 

#

I killed my first man long before I ever met Basim Umad. 

Girls my age would seek me out to be freed of pregnancies no one could know about, because they knew I would teach them how to make the tea themselves, and their mother need never know. They trusted me, and so many of them told me how they got into trouble. 

His name was Agi, a tax collector for the lord’s estate. I had first met him when Alvild treated him for an infection of the lung, and I hadn’t liked him. He was foul-tempered at the best of times, but worse was his wandering eye, always lighting upon the prettiest girl in a house. 

He could always accuse her father or her husband of not paying his tax, after all. Could have the family imprisoned, evicted… 

I planned it carefully, without speaking of it to anyone. I went out into the forest on my own, collecting the mushrooms Alvild had always told me to leave alone. How strange I must have seemed to those little spirits, seeking out what I had only ever collected by accident, whispering to them exactly what I meant to do with their help.

I wrapped the mushrooms in a cloth that I hid in my bodice, and I dried them by the hearth after Alvild had gone to bed. Black, shriveled little things, as miserable as the pain they caused. I didn’t dare grind them with Alvild’s mortar and pestle, so I rubbed them inside the cloth, between my two hands, until they were small enough I thought I could get away with it. 

I bartered for a bottle of whiskey, because I knew Agi to be a hard drinker. My powdered mushrooms dissolved in the bottle like a dream upon waking, and late one autumn night, I slipped away from Alvild’s house to pay a visit to the tax man, in his room at the tavern. 

I had combed my hair till it shone like burnished copper, dabbed rosewater behind my ears. I knew what I appeared to be, when Agi opened his door. He took in the sight of me, smiled, invited me inside. I told him I had brought him a gift, that he must have a drink. He said I should share, and I did not refuse. I held the glass to my closed lips, and watched. 

A more cunning man would have made sure I drank first, but Agi was not a cunning man. He was a manipulator and a coward, and he died like one, screaming and clawing at the hem of my dress. No one came to help him, and no one looked out their door or window as I left in the dark, the taste of death on my lips, and thunder in my heart. 

The girls who had once come to me for help would look at me differently, after that. Not with fear, but with knowing. I was not a woman who would only clip the new sprouts of the poisonous weed—I would destroy it the root.

#

I was scrubbing dirt and dried blood from under my fingernails when the feral little prince ducked inside my room and hid behind my wardrobe so that he could not be seen from the door. I glanced at him and cocked an eyebrow, and he held a finger to his lips, hardly able to contain his grin. 

There was a knock a few moments later, as I was still picking dark flecks out from under my nails. “Yes?” I called. 

The door opened, and a frazzled looking Haris scanned the room. “Have you seen Veland?” 

I didn’t look up from my fingers. “I haven’t. Has he run off on you?” I grimaced as I noticed a break in the nail of my index finger. I kept my nails short for practical reasons, but evidently not short enough. 

“Lya wanted me to keep an eye on him, and he took off when I was distracted.”

“If he turns up, I’ll be sure to send him to you,” I said, drying my hands. “You might try the stables.” I waited until Haris had gone, his footsteps fading down the hall, and I looked to Veland, who looked nearly read to shake apart in silent giggles. _“Are you avoiding something, or just giving him the run around?”_

Veland came running across the room to sit across from me as I filed my nails, smoothing them out so they wouldn’t snag or scratch a patient. _“Just hiding,”_ he said, pulling his feet up into the chair. That boy was incapable of sitting properly. Or sitting still. He looked around my room like an owl. _“Do you just have one room?”_

_“It’s all I need.”_ I tapped the table with my file, drawing his attention. _“As long as your here, you can practice your lessons. No writing, just speaking,”_ I said, before the look of dismay could completely engulf his face. _“We’re practicing your Sarenn. Tell me about your day.”_

To his credit, he didn’t immediately run away and decide he would try his luck hiding elsewhere. His grammar would still need quite a bit of work, but he was learning, and I understood what he was trying to say. When I spoke to him in Sarenn, I was careful to speak slow and clear, and Veland listened intently. He wanted to impress his mother, I supposed. 

Veland got very quiet after a bit, kicking his heels in the air. _“Are you well?”_ I asked, detecting discontent. 

Veland bit his lip. _“I miss Momo and everybody.”_

That would be the Atsa Hasi who had raised him. _“Of course you miss them. This is the first time you’ve been away from them like this. I missed my family, when I had to leave them.”_ I could hardly remember them now, I supposed they must have looked something like me. My grandfather was most certainly dead, and I couldn’t even recall my cousins’ names. 

_“They left already,”_ Veland said, sad. 

I supposed he would know. The changing season and flitting moon were the only calendars he knew. _“Summer will come again before you know it,”_ I assured him. Then, _“It will be my first winter this far north, too. We can keep each other company.”_ I smiled at him, unsure if I was being comforting or not. Anarin was better at this than I was. 

Veland smiled back. 

_“Now quick,”_ I whispered, _“find a new place to hide, before Haris comes back.”_

Veland hit the ground and disappeared, leaving my door to fall shut behind him. I laid my nail file aside and let out a breath. I was out of my element. There was nothing I could do to make things go faster, no problem that I could solve with deadly mushrooms. I had to wait, and watch, and nothing else. 

It was driving me mad. With Andon, at least, I was always moving. This—this stasis, where the only thing that changed were the faces in the cots of the lodge—I hadn’t done this in years. I could see what was to be done and had no idea how to get to it. 

I picked myself up, resolving to go into town. I had gained a little extra money from tending to minor injuries that Kressosi soldiers acquired on their nighttime outings, that they didn’t want to see the army physician for lest their misbehavior be reported. I had just enough that I could afford to pay a visit to Ania, and forget my troubles for a little while.


	12. Half Wild

The young man who’s leg I had taken off was named Vigi. He was healing well, though he was about to go mad from being bedridden. I eased him onto his side, so that he would not fall victim to bedsores, and laid a clean blanket over him. “You’re very lucky,” I told him. “Not many live after they get that sick.”

Vigi said nothing, head resting on his folded arm. 

“Has your family been to see you?” I asked.

“They have to work,” Vigi mumbled. “And I’m no good to them now.” 

Anarin was just the next bed over, washing arms and feet. She looked over, and shook her head. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “You’re much more useful alive than you are dead, or else your father wouldn’t have brought you here.” 

Vigi said nothing again. 

“I’m going to make you a cup of tea,” I told him, “it will help with the soreness.” 

As I went to the fire, Anarin finished what she was doing, and moved to Vigi’s bed. From the hearthside, I watched her sit behind him, taking out his braid and combing his hair with an ivory comb she had brought. She gently worked out the tangles of days of neglect, smoothing long brown hair out into her lap. 

Slowly, Vigi’s shoulders relaxed. Anarin was braiding his hair again when I returned, from the nape of the neck halfway down his back, where it was tied off with a length of leather cord. Then she helped him to sit, so he could drink. 

“You shouldn’t overwork yourself,” I told her, noting how tired she looked. “It isn’t going to get any easier for you as the weather gets colder.” It was yet difficult to tell that she was pregnant just by looking at her, but soon enough the swell would show under her skirts. 

Anarin shook her head. “Boredom kills the spirit,” she said. Her son was playing with children outside, because Anarin had grown to dislike leaving him in the castle. I suspected she wasn’t sleeping, but she refused to discuss it with me. 

Her men were not happy with her new hobby, that much was clear. Haris was almost always trailing behind her these days, which Anarin muttered was the agreement she had made to continue working. He would sulk out by the door, keeping an eye on Veland, while Anarin and I worked inside. After, we would make our way to the feast hall, and I would watch Anarin instruct the men working there. 

Most all of them were Sarenn, and Anarin spoke to them in their own language, so they listened to her as they never would to the few Kressosi officers who sometimes came to inspect and criticize their work. If those officers made true nuisances of themselves, Anarin would remind them who was closer to the commander’s ear, and the problems would go away. This feast hall was her domain to command. 

I didn’t know what she was up to until she brought one of her carpenters to the lodge. He was a respectable looking man, not the sort who really wanted to be in the lodge, except that “Mrs. Emiran” had asked him and was paying him for his work. 

He had brought the beginnings of a wooden leg and the boot that would fit it to Vigi’s thigh. Anarin explained to Vigi that they needed to be sure it would fit correctly, though he would not be able to wear it until the leg had healed. They took some measurements, the carpenter nodded, and promised Anarin it would be finished soon.   
“

It will take some getting used to,” Anarin told Vigi, a hand on his shoulder, “and you may not be as fast at first, but you will be able to walk about on it.” 

Vigi wasn’t quite so somber, after that. He smiled more readily, and wasn’t so grim when I changed his bandages or moved him to one side or the other. 

We were there late one day, I think Anarin thought I wasn’t paying attention. Very quietly I heard her ask Vigi if he would know the man who shot him, if he saw him again. Vigi said he would. 

“What do you think you’re about?” I asked her in a whisper, when we had a moment alone. “Or do you think your men just won’t notice if wolves start killing their men?”

Anarin’s eyes gave nothing away. “Do you want justice, or not?” 

I let out a breath. “Why don’t you leave that justice to me, and not your forest friends?”

Anarin gave a small smile. “Perhaps. First we have to find him.”  

#

I once nearly drowned in the river I was named for. I was only a child, prone to doing foolish things like playing on the rocks when Alvild had told me not to, heedless of how fast, how cold the river was, until I fell in and my breath seized in my chest and my limbs went stiff as oak wood. 

The strangest thing was that I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t have time for fear, I think.   
My head broke the water and I sucked in a breath before it pulled me down again, into the freezing dark. 

I would be rescued by a fisherman’s net, flung out across the river when he had seen me fall in, and hauled to shore tangled in its cords. “Hells, girl!” he shouted as he pulled me free, “You’re lucky to be alive!” 

I was surprised, when I saw that I was bloody. The water had numbed me, so that I didn’t feel it when I struck the rocks. “You must have seen the grinning face of Death herself,” the fisherman said, furiously rubbing my arms to put warmth back into them. 

I suppose I had. What I did not tell the fisherman, what I never told another living soul because I was not certain I even believed it, was what else I had seen.

The stories tell of the great snakefish of the Lor, who waits for the end, growing fat on the dead who are left to the river. 

I saw her, then, the pale grey flesh of the creature lurking in the water, and the great watery eye as big as a man’s head that took me in, and nudged me back to the surface, as if telling me it was not my time to die. Something changed in me that day that has never been quite the same. A sense that I owe that river a debt. 

#

The feast hall was completed not three days before the first snow of autumn, and Anarin held a small celebration for all those who had worked on it. It was nothing extravagant—fires in the hearth, a barrel of ale, roast goose with radishes and onions—but there was a general good humor, pride taken in what they had built. I watched Anarin float about the feast hall, greeting the men and thanking them for their hard work and craftsmanship, and I watched the men glow under her attention. 

She could have been a queen, if she wanted to. She could perform the right graces, make people feel seen and cared for. It was as if the incident the first day we arrived had never happened. 

Anarin was talking about legacy, about this structure they could take pride in. All the attention was on her, so no one noticed as I stepped outside into the thin layer of snow, sucking in a cold breath of air. 

I pulled my shawl tight against the chill and leaned back against the wall, closing my eyes. I could feel winter breathing down the back of my neck, and I wondered how Anarin felt when she met the Wolf face to face, if the fear was as deep as I thought it would be. 

I heard the crunch of boots in the snow, and opened my eyes to find Emiran, pulling a cigarette from his coat pocket. I was a little surprised—most men of his rank would carry a pipe, if they wanted to smoke. 

Emiran noticed me and nodded, cupping his hands around the flickering flame of a match as he lit his cigarette, watching the quiet street. “Does she worry you as much as she does me?” Emiran asked, not looking at me. 

“Commander?” 

“I’m not blind, Tyna.” He let out a breath, looked very tired. “I can see how you look at her.” 

I folded my arms across my chest, pressing my hands under my elbows to keep them warm. “I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.” 

Emiran laughed softly. “I thought Andon’s physician would be a better liar. Ah, well.” He rubbed a temple with the heel of his hand. “I understand, if that’s any consolation.” 

“All due respect, Commander,” I said, light as I could, “you don’t understand a damn thing about me.” 

Emiran was quiet for a moment, puffing on his cigarette, and he shrugged. “Maybe not. I don’t understand her, either.” He sighed, and for a moment I felt almost bad for him. I, at least, had the luxury of knowing who Anarin was, and why she was important. The poor bastard had no idea. 

“Do you believe all this?” Emiran asked. “All this about gods and spirits?”

I watched him from where I stood. “That’s like asking me if I believe the winter wind is cold, or the stars shine at night.” I had felt how barren Kressos was, not the land itself, but its people. Every flower and leaf sang for them, and it was as if they couldn’t hear. Or perhaps they chose not to. 

Emiran shook his head. “I know she leaves at night,” he said. “She comes back smelling like the forest, or like dust.” 

“She has trouble sleeping,” I said, as if that would satisfy him. “She probably leaves so she doesn’t wake you.” I tried to think of ways I could direct him away from this topic, some way to put any of his fears to rest, for Lya’s sake. Suspicious men were dangerous men. “There are herbs that would help her sleep, if she would take them.” 

Emiran looked carefully at me. “You know where she goes at night, don’t you?” 

I met his gaze. “I know many things, Commander. Not all of them concern your mistress.” 

He looked about to speak again, so I was swift to interrupt him. “This place makes her uneasy. Wouldn’t it be the same for you, if you were in her place? Her people were slaughtered here. I don’t think her sleeplessness has any more significant cause than that.” I turned my gaze away from him. “She cares deeply for you, Commander. It seems to me the least you can do is trust that fact.” 

Emiran leaned back against the wall. “I should never have come to this place,” he muttered. “Should have retired years ago.” 

On that, at least, we agreed. Fate would have drawn Anarin back here sooner or later. Emiran was an unnecessary element. 

Emiran flicked the last of his cigarette into the snow, in a way that spoke of a much younger man, a discontented soldier who knew better than to speak of that discontent. “Promise me one thing at least, Tyna,” he said. “Whatever you have to do to me, don’t let any harm come to her, or her children.”

I glanced away. “I don’t harm children, Commander. I prefer not to orphan them, too.”

He nodded, and left me without saying anything else. 

I lingered out in the cold, listening to what I could hear of the celebration inside through the heavy wooden walls. 

If Emiran did not rest easily inside Morhall, it was not hard to guess why. Anarin said she was ghost-haunted. Like as not, she wasn’t the only one, not when Emiran was sleeping beside the widow of a man he had killed, harboring that man’s only living son. Whether or not the souls of the dead truly linger, that tension would be in the air, and Emiran not understanding why.

#

I don’t know how Anarin found his name, because so far as I knew, Vigi had yet to leave the lodge since I had removed his leg. I had no way of knowing if it was the right name, but in the end, I suppose I didn’t care. It is impossible for me to watch my people suffer, day after day, knowing why they suffer, and not think that someone must be punished for it. Someone must be prevented from creating further suffering. 

It couldn’t be done within Morhall, Emiran’s scrutiny would be on me before the man had drawn his last breath. If it happened outside of the castle walls, I knew I could make sure I was not noticed. I could make sure there was nothing anyone could prove. 

It is an easy thing, to follow a man who does not know he is being followed. Easier, when he is already drunk, and means to become drunker. I wore plainclothes, and a hood over my head. 

No one noticed me follow the men into a tavern, no one noticed as I hung back and watched where they sat. 

I had been hired to kill men for less than this, so I did not know why it sat so uneasily with me. 

A slip behind, a pretend fumble, bumping into the man, and muttering an apology as I slipped away again, too quickly for him to notice the needle pricked into his skin. I moved to the hearth, and waited to be sure. 

A few minutes, maybe more, and he convulsed, vomiting across the table. People were slow to be alarmed—it was not as if vomit was uncommon in a tavern. Spasms, however, were. 

I did not need to see the whole of this. He was past saving, now. 

The night sky was clear as I stepped outside, and I could hear the wolves howling in the forest. I did not stop to listen to them. 

#

Alvild knew it was me who had killed Agi. We did not speak of it, but I knew it in the way she looked at me. She began to give me new lessons, in how to process the kinds of mushrooms and herbs I had once been forbidden from harvesting. 

We wore leather gloves that were coated in oil, to keep the poison from seeping through our skin, thick cloths over our nose and mouth, and a thinner cloth that we could see through over our eyes. “You can kill yourself working carelessly,” Alvild told me. “Remember that.” 

The poisons we made were kept out of sight of visitors, in a particular chest, carefully labeled. I hadn’t realized before that Alvild already had a collection, that I now added to. 

There was a man that came to the house sometimes, Alvild had always sent me away when he came, and I had assumed he was someone I ought to avoid. It turned out that he was the one that she sold the poisons to. He was dressed like any other Sarenn man, but when he removed his hood, his hair was cut close to the scalp, which shocked me more than the burn scar on the side of his face. 

I had never seen a man who didn’t wear some kind of braid, whether the flat plait of the sleek haired, or the several tight rows bound together of those with hair as wiry as Alvild’s. Criminals were sometimes shaved, I had heard, but they were usually condemned to die, and if the judge was feeling merciful, their hair might be given to their loved ones. 

This man, when he spoke, revealed himself by accent to be Kressosi. I could see that he would have been handsome, without the burn that marked him. His skin was the same gleaming red-brown of cherry wood, eyes the cool dark brown of forest soil. Had he been a woman, Alvild might have lost me then. 

He hardly glanced at me, while he spoke to Alvild. “There is trouble coming,” he said. 

Alvild waved a hand. “There is always trouble coming.”

“I may not be able to cross the river for some time,” he said, handing her a purse that alarmed me with how heavy it was. “So, whatever you have, I’ll take it.” 

“Are you trying to kill an army?” Alvild asked. “Or maybe their horses?”

The man did not smile. “If I cannot cross again before next spring, I still need to eat through the winter.”

Alvild shrugged, and sent me to fetch the chest. She had me tell him what each thing was, and finally he looked at me, but not the way most men did. He was listening, patiently, and nodding as he inspected the bottles and jars, loading them quietly into his own trunk. 

“You have questions,” he said, as I trailed off. 

I gazed at him for a moment. “Who are you?” I asked. “What do you need these for?” 

His mouth quirked up at the corner. The side of his face that was burned was pulled back in a sort of perpetual grimace. “I sell them to Kressosi apothecaries, who can’t get the herbs that grow this far north. I’m not an assassin, if that’s what you thought.” He pointed at his face. “Too recognizable.” 

I think I was meant to laugh, but I couldn’t. “What happened to you?” 

He nodded a bit, looked amused. “War. That’s all.” 

#

Vigi stood uncertainly on his new leg, wincing a little at the unfamiliar pressure on his not-quite-healed leg. The carpenter Anarin had come with was explaining how the joint worked, how he would have to adapt to the new gait. We had quite the little audience out in front of the lodge, where the light was good enough that we could see and the ground frozen enough that Vigi could stand on it. 

It was nice work. Plain, but functional and strong. I wondered how much Anarin had paid for it. 

Vigi’s father was so overcome, he could hardly speak. He was an older man, and Vigi clearly a younger son. Vigi had mentioned something to Anarin about older brothers who had been killed when the Kressosi took Morhall. Anarin had spent a great deal of time speaking to Vigi and the others, getting to know them, and I watched them look forward to her visits, while Haris skulked about by the door, keeping his distance. 

Veland was often there, too, practicing his Sarenn with the bedridden and their caretakers. It didn’t escape my notice that his favorite people, however, were the ones who could speak at least a little Trader’s Tongue. 

Vigi’s father tried to thank Anarin for her help, but she shook her head, refusing the thanks, and smiled, putting her hand on the old man’s arm. _“I should be thanking you, for welcoming me.”_ It was a pretty little game she played, she would have been formidable as someone’s first wife, rather than being wasted as a wife so low-ranked her sons would have had to seek out lords to pledge their service to, and her daughters compete for desirable marriages. 

Haris was restless, and it was making the others anxious, so I went to stand by him. “If you don’t stop fidgeting,” I said in a low voice, “they’re going to think you’re liable to shoot someone.” 

Haris was grinding his teeth. “This is absurd.” 

“If it makes your household more peaceful you don’t have a right to complain,” I muttered. “You don’t have to babysit her.”

Haris did not look at me, but I knew what he was thinking. There was no force on earth short of Death that would make him leave me alone with Anarin. 

I didn’t blame him for not trusting me, I just found him to be an irritating inconvenience. “She’s happier, doing this work,” I said, quiet. “Did she do anything like this in Kressos, or did you and Emiran keep her cooped up like a nightingale on a gold chain?”

Haris did not visibly bristle, but a muscle in his jaw tightened. “A man died in a tavern, a few nights back,” he said. “Poisoned.” His eyes slid to me. “I don’t suppose you would know anything about that.” 

“I’m hardly the only person who knows how to brew poisons, Mr. Haris,” I said coolly. “Why should I harm someone so inconsequential?” 

“Yes,” he said, “why would you?” 

A tugging on my skirt drew my attention, and Veland held onto my knees. _“Auntie,”_ he said, _“do I have to practice my writing today?”_

I arched an eyebrow. _“Did your mother say you had to?”_

He screwed up his face in a frown, and I laughed. _“Bring me your notebook. We’ll practice writing your name and a few other words.”_

Haris looked no more pleased about this than he did about anything else. I knew he was fond of the boy, but this jealousy was childish. I left him by the door to settle by the fire with Veland. His handwriting was getting a little better, in that fewer of his letters were backwards. I gave him a sentence to write down, would correct his letters, and have him write it again. 

Veland gripped his charcoal stick tightly, frowning in concentration as he wrote. I cleaned my tools while he did so, to keep my hands busy. 

_“Auntie,”_ Veland said, looking up, _“why do some people write, and some people don’t?”_

I glanced at him, and considered my answer. _“Some people, like the Hasi,”_ I said, nodding at him, _“focus their time on memory, so that they remember messages and stories correctly, even a long time later. Others spend that time on learning to write, so that things can be written down and kept, and you don’t have to remember them exactly. One isn’t better than the other, but if you only know one, it’s hard to move between the two. Do you understand?”_

Veland thought for a bit, and nodded. _“I guess so.”_

Anarin found us by the hearth, and put her hand on Veland’s cheeks and pressed a kiss into his hair. _“Time to go, Puppy,”_ she said, and seeing his work, she smiled at me. _“Thank you, Lady Tyna.”_

I nodded, and glanced away. 

#

Some young men are given to racing elk during the rut, when the bulls are so riled they would run thrice around the world and still be unwilling to stop. I didn’t think anything of it, when I saw a handful of young men placing flags around the edges of the empty fields, setting the course for a race. I thought nothing of it when I saw a few brave young soldiers and Sarenn boys gathering their elk, each shaking heads and snorting, pawing at the ground with short ribbons tied into their antlers.

Thought nothing of it, until I saw a scarlet scarf wrapped over a head of black hair perched lightly on that demon of a bull I would have known anywhere.   
Emiran and Haris were nowhere to be found—the sly witch had given them the slip, and sat among all these cocky young men with her chin held high and the reins tight in her fists. 

I felt out of place among the many men and the young girls that had slipped away from their mothers to watch, but I had seen elk races before, and horse races in Azira. I knew how badly they could go awry, and my heart hammered in my chest seeing Anarin there. I heard the muttering, people wondering what the commander’s woman was about, even though they must have seen her running the beast ragged a dozen or more times. 

I held onto the branches of a weather-worn apple, foot levied against the roots so that I could see above the crowd. The elk were brought into line, stamping impatiently and bugling. Someone gave a blast on a horn, and the muddy snow was tossed up behind them with the impact of a dozen cannonballs. 

A ribbon of scarlet out behind her, that was how I tracked Lya, bent low between the arcing prongs of Bili’s antlers. 

She had been a girl once. That thought rang in my head like the pealing of a Kressosi temple bell. She had been a girl. When I had met her uncle, Benwulf, he had spoken of his niece, half-wild, who played cards and raced her father’s elk. The memory had needled itself into my brain because of how much I disliked the man when he had made a comment about the kind of husband it would take to tame a girl like that. 

Five bulls pulled away from the main pack, Anarin’s among them. 

A coal in my chest burned at the thought of what she had been sent away to, the things that had forced her to become small and meek. That was why she liked that demon bull, why she indulged his wilder tempers. She would not beat the wild out any creature like men had tried to beat the wild out of her. 

The course took a sharp turn, and I watched Bili leap, twisting in the air so that he was just that little bit further ahead, powerful back legs propelling him forward. Anarin had tied no ribbons on his antlers—she had painted them, a fierce bloody red, tipped in white. There were just three of them in the lead now, one stripling of a boy in a Kressosi uniform and one slightly older Sarenn, with a bright red beard. But I could tell, even then, that their bulls did not have the sheer fury in them that Bili did. He was younger, the scale of his ribs greater. The steaming breath of those bulls whipped out behind them like wildfire smoke. 

My knuckles were white around the limb of the tree to which I clung, watching them. I wanted to have known her, the feral girl who had been too big for the men around her. I wanted to have known Anarin when she was still more wolf than woman. I wanted to see her, sixteen and besting every man in Arborhall who wanted to race an elk. 

Another corner, this under the boughs of an aged fir that snagged Anarin’s scarf, tearing it from her head. The scarlet ribbon fluttered in the wake of the passing bulls, and clung to the branch that had claimed it. 

There is a sound, to the closing stretch of a race. The pounding of cloven hooves. The heaving of lungs. That faded from my mind as I saw Anarin’s face come into view. 

I had seen her composed, seen her angry but contained. I think I had even seen her afraid. Now I saw her with her lips curled back in a snarl, thick strands of black hair come loose from her braid and whipping her face, fists white-knuckled around the reins, no trace of the demure mistress, of the soft and doting mother. My heart soared for reasons I could hardly bring myself to name. 

The other two bulls began to lag, and Anarin whipped Bili harder. 

It is hard to describe the sight as I saw it, the red paint on Bili’s antlers, the way Anarin’s hair—so quickly falling out of its braid—streamed out behind her, the clods of mud tossed up behind them. A woman half-wild. 

They thundered past the last pair of flags to a cheer, and I abandoned the tree, pushing my way out of the crowd as Bili slowed, and Anarin circled back, sitting a little straighter, an exhilarated smile on her face, lit up from within like a midsummer bonfire. I couldn’t help but echo it, a strange light feeling in my chest. 

I meant to call out to her, to share even a little of her joy—and that was when I noticed Emiran. 

He came riding toward her, a look on his face that I knew from other men. Anarin saw him too, and I saw her smile wilt like flowers in a drought. The light feeling in my ribs turned to stone. 

Emiran caught Bili’s reins, and bowed his head to speak to Anarin so that they would not be overheard, but I could imagine well enough what he was saying from the way the fight went out of Anarin, and something like embarrassment filled her frame. 

I thought that might be the end, everything I had just seen in her would be buried once more.

I don’t know what Emiran said, but Anarin stiffened and jerked back, and Bili snorted and tossed his head, shoving back Emiran’s gelding. Anarin spurred Bili to a trot, and cut across the course to the tree where her scarf hung. She yanked it from the boughs, the pretty thing I knew that Emiran had bought for her, and tied it over her undone hair. She looked half a witch, and the barely concealed scowl on her face made people keep away from her as she returned. 

“Sargis!” I called. 

Her head turned, and I saw some of the anger ease out of her face. “Lady Tyna,” she said, pulling Bili to a stop. “I didn’t know you were here.” 

I went up to her, staying clear of the bull’s head, as he panted and snorted. “You’re insane,” I said, “but that was amazing.”

Lya smiled. “I’m sure to pay for it, but thank you.” 

I put a hand on her leg before she pulled away from me. “Lya,” I said, my voice soft. “Please at least wait until you’re no longer pregnant to do something like that again. I want to see you race, but—that was very dangerous.” 

She looked at me oddly, and after a moment, she nodded. “I will. You can’t much race during the winter, anyway.” Her eyes flicked toward Emiran, and her lips twitched as she tried to hold back a grimace. “Please tell everyone at the lodge I won’t be able to visit them today.”

I nodded. “You’ll be missed.” 

There was such immense sadness in her eyes, when I said that. She only gave me an expression that was more grimace than smile, and clucked her tongue to Bili. The bull gave a great snort and walked to Emiran, who was watching me coldly. I hugged my arms across my chest and met his gaze, hating him and everything that he was. 

Anarin went away with him, and if I was glad of anything, it was that I didn’t see her head bow as she rode away.


	13. Luck

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “A soldier of the King of Kressos will heed three laws, above all else.  
> The first, that he shall protect king and country, be it even at the expense of his own life, fortune, and family ties.  
> The second, that he shall not make oaths of allegiance to any but the king which he serves, and that he will honor his oath until he is either released from it, or dies.  
> The third, that should he fail to carry out the first two, he shall accept that the punishment for his failings is death.”  
> Tilo Gerr, _A Memoir of War on the River Lor_

Lya said nothing to me, as we rode, and I said nothing to her. I was too furious to speak, I suppose. 

Even knowing what she had told me, what she believed—what I couldn’t quite bring myself to disbelieve—I could not grasp the change that had come over her in the north. This was not the woman I had known in Kressos, or if she was, I had seen only the barest glimpse of her before now. 

“I’ll meet you in our quarters,” I said, when we reached the stables, and she nodded, saying nothing. She stroked Bili’s face before he was led away, pressing a kiss between the beast’s eyes, murmuring to him in Sarenn. 

Lya went into the castle ahead of me, and I diverted to the room where I had left Todd, watching over Veland and a handful of the servants’ children. A number of people had assumed Veland was my son, and I had not corrected them. He looked so much like Lya, she could have said anyone was his father, and it would have been difficult to dispute it. 

Veland saw me before Todd, and tugged on Todd’s sleeve, pointing, before he went back to a game of some kind with the children, involving dolls and what I was fairly certain was a fort of furniture that Todd must have helped them build. 

“You found her?” Todd asked quietly.

I nodded. 

“She’s alright?” Todd pressed, studying my expression.

I nodded again, scrubbing a hand over my face. “She was out with that blasted elk. Racing.” 

Todd drew in a long breath, and let it out. “Where is she now?”

“In our rooms. I wanted to check on Veland, first.”

“He’s fine,” Todd said. “Doesn’t know anything’s amiss, and it would probably be best to keep it that way.” 

I sighed. There was nothing about this I liked, nothing I could do to ease the fear whispering in the back of my mind. “Can you keep him here for a while longer?”

“Keep him?” Todd laughed. “I’d be hard pressed to make him leave.” He patted my back. “I’ll keep an eye on him. You go talk to her.” 

I embraced him, put my face in his hair. Todd and I had been together for so long—I could hardly imagine life without him anymore. “Hey,” Todd whispered into my ear, “everything’s going to be fine.”

It had been a long time since he felt the need to say that to me. It gave me an idea how I must have seemed to him, less and less certain with each passing day. Something everyone else could already see. 

It is not good to be seen to be uncertain. 

Lya was sitting by the hearth when I found her, stitching together the tear in her scarf. Her hair was loose over her shoulders, a river of black that fell past her waist. I watched her for a moment, and she didn’t look up. 

“I used to tear my clothes all the time,” she said, quiet. “My mother got so sick of it—she taught me how to repair them myself. To sew up the tear and embroider over it, so you could never tell it was damaged in the first place.” 

“Lya—”

“I could ride an elk almost as soon as I could walk,” she said. 

“You could have gotten yourself killed.” 

“I haven’t felt that alive since I was married.” She looked into the fire. “It was like—waking up after ten years asleep.” 

“Lya.”

She looked down at her stitching and wouldn’t look at me. I pressed my back against the door, because I needed the support. “You scared the hell out of me,” I whispered. 

Lya said nothing. 

“If something had happened to you—” I rubbed my face. “It’s not just you I stand to lose, Ly. And I’m not the only one you’d leave behind.” 

Lya rubbed the silver needle between her thumb and forefinger, thread trailing over her fingers. “I’ve spent so long being afraid,” she whispered. “I understand why you’re upset,” she said, “but for once, I felt like myself again.” She looked back down to her stitching, hands moving to pull the tear together. “I won’t do it again. Not while pregnant, anyway. It was just something I needed to do.” 

I went to sit in the chair across from her, and still she wouldn’t look at me. “If you are not happy here,” I said, quiet, “I won’t keep you.”

Her eyes shot up with such alarm and confusion I regretted saying it. “What?” 

“Ever since we began to come north,” I said, “you’ve chafed at every restriction and you always seem to be looking somewhere else.” I had half expected to wake up one morning on our journey and find her gone, no trace of her except the empty bedroll beside me. 

“Where would I _go?”_ She was clutching her scarf tight in her fists. “With one child already and another on the way—do you think it’s so easy to bounce from one bed to the next, begging for support?” Lya was angry, now, perhaps more angry than I had ever seen her. 

“If that is the only reason you’re staying—” I started. I knew that Kaspar Heita would still welcome her back. He was sick at heart for her, or else he wouldn’t have spent so much time writing, even when she only rarely answered.

“It isn’t!” There was such sharp indignation in her voice. “I spend so much time justifying my relationship with you to Tyna, I didn’t think I would have to defend it to you.” Lya stood, perhaps to storm off, but I caught her hand before she could leave. 

“Lya,” I said, as gently as I could, “I only mean that I don’t want you to be unhappy.” 

I watched her fight her own anger for a moment, and she gave a long heavy breath that was meant to abate her temper. “You are not what makes me unhappy,” she said. “If that were the case, Muras, I wouldn’t have come this far.” Lya gazed at me, the dark earthy-brown of her eyes hard to read. “What is it that you really want to say?” 

I stood, drawing her other hand into mine. Her middle bumped against me now, when we stood close. “I want you to be my wife,” I said. “Really and truly, not just in name here. I can protect you better, if you’re my wife.” 

Lya turned her face away from me. “Your family would never accept me.”

“They don’t have to,” I said, stubbornly. “If I’m to be stationed here until Andon’s paranoia abates, I’ll be here a long time. I’m my father’s only heir. He’ll have no choice.”

Lya closed her eyes, a pained expression on her face. “When my husband was killed,” she said, each word slow and measured, “I promised myself I would never be another man’s wife.” 

The husband she never named, I knew him well. He was a shadow between us, ever since the day I first laid eyes on her. 

“I can’t be your wife, Muras,” she said, gripping my hands. “I can love you, I can bear your sons and stand by your side, but I can’t be your wife.” Lya reached up, sweeping a strand of hair back from my face. “It’s bad enough,” she said softly, “that someday you’ll ask me to cut your son’s hair short, so I can be mother to a proper Kressosi son. Don’t ask me to become a proper Kressosi woman, too.” 

My chest ached, looking at her. I could protect her, if she was my wife—and whether she wanted to admit it or not, she needed protection. I bent to kiss her, and Lya’s hands were warm in mine. 

_It’s all well and good_ , I heard my father’s voice say, _for a man who already has sons to waste his time with an unfit woman, but not you._

“I would be happy if I only had daughters,” I said. “If they all had something of you.” 

Lya shook her head and smiled a little sadly. “You don’t have enough ambition,” she said, “you tripped and fell into being a war hero.” 

I smiled. That was as apt a description as any. “I don’t need ambition,” I said. “I have luck.” 

#

The part of Kressos in which I was born is never cold enough for snow. The winters are grey and full of rain and mud which flows between rows of grapevines, sending even the meanest feral cat into the safety of a house or barn. At the end of one of those winters, I and my sister Tomlin were born, to a mother who’s name I’ve never known.

She was sent away, almost as soon as she could stand again, and I and Tomlin given over to a nurse. That was the price my father’s wife demanded, in exchange for our legitimacy. 

Our faces didn’t look so different from those of our sisters, Tomlin and I, but it was clear we did not have the same mother. Our sisters had hair as brown as the bare vines in winter, and we had hair that bleached white in the sun, as our faces and arms burned pink. We burned so badly that our nurse forbid us to go out without long sleeves and broad hats, that made us look like miniature versions of the men and women who worked in the vineyards on the long hot days. 

I remember Tomlin as fierce and strong, but I don’t know how much of that is colored by how often I was sick. A physician lived in my father’s house near constantly while I was young, and I did not understand then how unusual that was. My earliest memories are tinged with fevers, and Tomlin sitting cross-legged on the side of my bed with a songbird she had captured, and would release within an hour, once I had seen it. 

I thought then that she came to see me out of kindness. I think, now, that it was loneliness. Our father had six legitimate daughters before us, and our sisters had little to do with us. Our father’s wife made sure of that, keeping her girls at a distance. All Tomlin and I had were each other. 

An aspiring young officer can enlist in an academy as young as fifteen, and his tuition sponsored if he can prove himself capable enough. I’m not certain if Tomlin ever forgave me for leaving her alone in that house. 

Certainly my father never forgave me for abandoning him. 

#

The work of managing a military base in the absence of war is a largely tedious affair, one best spent running soldiers through a number of drills and giving them enough work to keep them out of trouble as best as one can. If Morhall was more comfortable than a border fort, it did not make it any less dull. 

I was ignoring papers I should have been looking over in favor of watching Lya dress to go out. She was combing out her hair, speaking softly to Veland as he frowned deeply over his workbook. 

“You’re sure you aren’t overworking yourself?” I asked.

Lya gave me a look that suggested she was holding back a sigh. “I’m not made of rose petals. Lady Tyna will fuss over me enough, don’t worry.” 

The thought of Tyna ‘fussing’ was a bit discomfiting. I didn’t want Tyna paying overly much attention to anyone I cared for. 

“If anyone can be accused of overworking,” Lya went on, sweeping her hair back to braid it, “it’s you. I hardly see you, except in the evenings.” 

Todd made a sound of agreement, pulling his boots on. “He’s always been that way,” he told Lya. 

Veland asked a question, and drew Lya’s attention away from my work habits. I went to the vanity and splashed cold water on my face, as much to have something to do as to shake off the last dregs of sleep. Todd was watching at me when I looked up. 

“You do overwork yourself,” he said. “You’ll run yourself ragged before midwinter at this rate.” 

Lya tied her scarf over her hair and ears, the red one that she had torn in the elk race. You couldn’t see the tear now, except that I could recognize her needlework as different from the rest. She set to combing out Veland’s hair while he worked, coaxing the tangles smooth. She hummed a tune under her breath, running Veland’s hair through her fingers. 

I suppose it’s foolish to be envious of a child, but there was an easiness to their relationship, even as they were still getting to know each other. 

“Muras,” Todd said, softly. 

I sighed and rubbed my face. “And I suppose you two are bound for the lodge again?” 

Lya glanced at me. “I actually thought I would go see the feast hall today.” She tied off Veland’s braid, kissed the top of his head. I watched her turn to the bed, brush her hand over the wolf skin. 

I hated that skin. 

“I’ll go with you then,” I said, “I can afford a day to see what our treasury has been paying for.” 

Todd chided me for making everything about work, but Lya wasn’t looking at me. Her fingers still touched the white fur, one hand on Veland’s shoulder. I had thought about throwing that fur on the fire more than once, destroying it so it could enchant her no longer. 

She turned to look at me, then, as if she knew what I was thinking. “I think the midwinter feast should be a masquerade. Winter is hard, it is best to distract people from that.” 

“It’s yours to plan,” I said, “you can do with it what you wish.” 

Lya didn’t look especially pleased with that answer, but she said no more about it, pulling her cloak from the wall. She spoke again to Veland, and the boy abandoned his book with a relieved expression. Lya dressed him for the cold weather, and I set to getting my own coat, wondering idly if Tomlin had written to me since my last letter, and if I was likely to even see it until well after the spring thaw. By then, I could likely write to her with the name of my child. 

The air had taken a turn for the bitter, though I knew well enough how much worse it would get. Most of the elk had turned docile, following the end of the rut. Lya’s creature still had the worst temper of any of them. The sheds of his antlers, still stained red, were tied to the door of his stable. 

Lya said little as we rode, except when Veland asked her some question. The wind was up that day, making the forest mumble and groan, and the snow stir in the roads. 

The feast hall had smoke rising from the vents, fires lit to warm those who still worked inside. It was dim, as they had lit no lanterns, but it did not take long for the men to realize that Lya had come, and gather to update her on their work, a swirl of Sarenn that I could not have hoped to parse. I made myself busy looking wandering about the room, looking at the beams and the wooden creatures that were beginning to accumulate around them—serpents and stags, cattle and goats, sly cats peeking from around corners. It was charming in its own way, I supposed. 

I warmed my hands at one of the fires, but couldn’t shake the feeling of bone-deep chill that had settled in me with the first snows. Between that, and the dreams that had begun to dog me every night, I felt as if I had not slept in a decade. 

A man settled in by the fire across from me, perhaps only just younger than myself, and dressed as a traveler. His braid was long even by Sarenn standards, and his beard close trimmed, the ruddy brown of cherry bark, flecked with copper. What struck me most were his eyes, black as deep night. He gave me a sly grin, and spoke in clear and perfect Kressosi. “You are a hard man to track, Commander Emiran.” 

I gazed at him. “Do I know you, sir?”

“No,” the man said, “but I know you. Your she-wolf has been careful to keep me at a distance, but she cannot always be vigilant on your behalf.” 

Strange, that ‘she-wolf’ didn’t sound like an insult. 

“Are you Sarenn or Kressosi?” I asked. 

“I think you will find I am a little of many things,” the man replied. He put his hands to the fire, and it was only then I noticed that his feet were bare, and one twisted. How could a man stand to go without boots in this winter? “What I am interested in, Commander, is what you mean to do.” 

I glanced at him, growing uneasy for reasons I couldn’t name. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“A decision is coming your way,” the man said. “You will have to choose who you are loyal to. I have an interest in knowing your answer.” 

A silence hung between us, and I felt the cold sink deeper into my bones. “Who are you?” I asked. 

I did not like his grin, the way it climbed across his face like a curling vine. “Ask the she-wolf. She knows a few names I’ve worn.” 

I glanced in Lya’s direction, and found her looking in mine. She separated herself from the workmen, and made her way over to the fire. She put her hand on my shoulder, and gave the man a hard look. She spoke to him in Sarenn, her voice cold. 

The man laughed, and drank from a flask he took from under his coat. “I’m only asking a question, Vulgafra.” 

Lya’s fingers tightened on my shoulder. “It is none of your concern,” she said. “Unless you claim to speak for him, now.” 

“I have an interest in his doings,” The man said, “and by extension, yours.” 

“You need to leave this place,” Lya said. “And not bother any of mine again.” 

The man took another drink, considering Lya without a smile. “The time is coming, Vulgafra. You cannot hide behind winter forever.” He stood, holding the weight off his twisted foot. He said something to Lya in Sarenn, and gave me a nod and a lazy salute, tapping his fist over his heart with a nod of his head. “Consider your loyalties, Commander. They won’t repay you equally.” 

Lya did not let go of my shoulder until the man was well out of sight. She turned to me and made a show of fussing over my coat, though I didn’t miss the tremble in her hands. “What did he say to you?” she asked. 

I caught her hands, warm in my own. “Who is he?” I asked. 

Lya hesitated, in the way she did when she was considering how much of the truth to tell me. “A traveler. A thief. Someone who makes his living on strife and disruption. Someone best avoided. He has a dozen names and none of them are of any import to you.” She glanced back over her shoulder, as if not convinced he was gone. “If you see him again you must not speak to him. No good will come of it.”

“He knows you.” 

“He knows many people,” Lya said. “We cannot speak of this here, please, Muras.” She looked at me, eyes pleading. “Let’s go for a ride, and I—” she hesitated, “I will tell you anything you want to know.” 

#

Tomlin and I would hide from our governess in the vineyards, stealing our father’s grapes from the vine until we were near sick with them. We would be knights of old, or heroes of new tales, with swords of orange branches. Sometimes we would collapse, exhausted and sunburned, under the shade of the vines, and it was once like that we first noticed the woman on the edge of the field. 

She wasn’t dressed richly, probably a servant of another house. The most unusual thing was her hair, copper red—a more common color in Saren than it ever was in Kressos. Parts of it were near golden in the sunlight. She was not very old, I don’t think, but as a child everyone seems much older than you. She was watching Tomlin and I, too distant for us to be sure of her expression or identity, and when she saw us looking she turned and hurried down the road, before we could have hoped to catch up to her, if we had given chase. 

We would see her again, perhaps two or three times in a month, for nearly the whole season. I took ill, once, and Tomlin was out in the vineyards by herself when she saw the woman. As Tomlin told it to me, the woman saw Tomlin, and began looking for me. She did not flee as Tomlin drew closer, but clung anxiously to the low stone wall that marked the edge of our father’s land. “Where is your brother?” she asked. 

Tomlin told her that I was sick, but that the physician had said I would soon recover. The woman seemed a little relieved, but mostly afraid. She reached into the pocket of her apron, and gave Tomlin two little bundles wrapped in kerchiefs. “Put one of these under his bed,” she said, “and the other under yours. They will protect you. Tell no one, please.” 

Tomlin inspected them carefully, before she brought them to me. An iron nail in each, wound in red cord, with a mix of herbs that smelled tantalizingly strange. We deemed the woman a witch, but perhaps a kind one. Tomlin put the strange bundle in the box of treasures she often brought me when I was ill—curious dried leaves, stones that glimmered, a stray button found on a path—which I kept under the bed. I don’t know what she did with hers. 

I was well again within a day, and I never saw my mother after that.

#

Bili was in a foul temper, perhaps sensing Lya’s anxiety. “What did he say to you?” she asked again, when we were on the fringes of the forest, sheltered from the worst of the wind. Veland had nearly vanished inside Todd’s coat, only distinguishable by his face peering out from under the rabbit fur cap against Todd’s chest.

“That you had been careful to keep him at a distance, so he couldn’t speak to me. That I would soon have to choose who I was loyal to.” 

Lya was very quiet for a long moment, and then she let out a breath. “I never know anymore,” she said, “how much you’re willing to believe, and how much will make me sound like a raving madwoman.” She gave a firm tug to Bili’s reins, stilling him when he meant to fight. “We shouldn’t go far in,” she said, “the wind will sometimes rip trees from the ground.” 

I watched her fuss at the edge of her gloves, a troubled expression deep in her face. 

“He wasn’t human, was he?” I asked, at last. I hated to say the words, to give voice to the things that plagued me most at night. 

“No,” Lya said, without hesitation. “He isn’t. Does it matter to you what he actually is?” 

“How does he know you?”

“I met him face to face for the first time in Wetasur,” she said. “But I imagine he knew me before that.” Lya would not—or could not—look at me. “He knows the Winter Wolf, that is why he knows me.” 

The wind groaned in the trees, and I thought I heard the howling of wolves, but I could not be sure. “That was the ‘him’ you were referring to, then?” 

Lya nodded, her face still troubled. 

“And when he said ‘the time is coming’…?”

Lya seemed to struggle most with this. Todd brought his elk around, Veland pulled his scarf up to hide his face from the wind. “Is it to do with why we’re here?” Todd asked. “With the prince?” 

“In a way,” Lya admitted, reluctantly. “Though your prince would have to be a seer to know what he should be afraid of.” 

A worm of a thought emerged from the back of my throat, a thought I didn’t want to acknowledge. “He’s the one who gave you the horn. The old beggar who followed us from Wetasur.” It came back to me, what Lya had said, when I was too unsettled to give it its full weight. _There are more gods in this land than just the Wolf._

Lya met my gaze, and said nothing. 

“They want war,” I said, a sinking certainty filling my gut. “Your gods calling on you, giving you these things... they want a war.” 

Lya held Bili’s reins tightly, and looked back to the town. “I owe a debt,” she said, “this is how he wants it paid.” She was quiet for a long moment, the tails of her scarf obscuring her face from me. “I don’t know what to do,” she said finally, her voice hardly audible over the wind. “I always assumed I would die, and that would be that. This—this is nothing I ever asked for.” 

“What if you refused?” Todd asked, an arm around Veland. “Can you refuse?” 

Lya laughed, and wiped at her eyes. “Only a Kressosi would think you can refuse a god who comes collecting. I asked a favor of one, accepted a gift from another. There is no going back now.” The trees creaked and groaned over us. “Nothing can be done until spring. That’s the only grace I have, before they will begin demanding things of me in earnest. So we have that long, before we have to decide what that means.” 

#

A man who wishes to advance in rank as a soldier of Kressos cannot be seen to be superstitious. Superstition is seen to be a sign of instability, or cowardice. 

Still, it is possible to keep a discreet item by one’s bed. A small box, with a small charm given by the mother who was forbidden to see you. Only Todd was ever close enough to me to find it, and ask what it was. I told him, then, when we were hardly more than boys, that I kept it out of sentimentality—a lesser sin than superstition. It was, after all, the only gift I had ever received from the woman who gave birth to me. 

I think he knew better. If not then, he at least came to understand what it really meant, and by then, he didn’t think less of me for it. It is hard to shake belief, when one has never been as seriously ill after receiving such a gift as they were before. Hard to shake belief, when a large part of your reputation is built on your resilience, how you never seem to be seriously injured, how no weather manages to truly make you ill. 

I spent several years stationed at a fort along the River Lor, holding back Sarenn attacks. It was a miserable station, always damp and never adequately warm, with long stretches of dull months punctuated by unpredictable raids. In all that time, the worst injury I ever received was a musket shot that went clean through the arm. 

I had a reputation for being lucky. 

Small wonder that Alek wanted me along for his march north. It was a mad plan, to cut through Saren and go straight for Morhall. There were miles of wild terrain pocketed with enemies who had centuries of desire to kill you, and not enough time to ever reach it before winter, if you were fighting your way there. Alek needed all the luck he could get. 

I didn’t just keep that charm under my pillow, on that march. I wore it around my neck, waking and sleeping, from the moment we crossed the Lor in the spring to the time we first sighted Morhall in the throes of winter. 

It is difficult, to think back on that day. Somehow, in all those months of marching, knowing that we aimed to cut off the head under the Sarenn crown, I had not thought about all the women, the children, that would be there. That we would be expected to destroy the whole royal line, as one roots out an infected vine. 

They had never needed defenses within that castle before, and so there were none. We broke the wall and we were as devastating as a landslide. 

Luck can keep you from illness and injury. It can make you a leader who does not often lose men. It can carry you through miles of ice and snow and wind that strips the life from your bones. 

It can lead you to the door concealing the head of the snake. 

People who were not there like to ask about the killing of the king of Saren. I have a story I tell, but the truth is that I remember little of the act itself. I know what his corpse looked like after, of course, but that is not what lingers in my mind. 

There was a draft, that by all rights I shouldn’t have noticed at all. Whatever secret door had meant to be concealed from my eyes, it had not been shut all the way, and in the space of a breath I saw the flash of a red silk gown, and the face of a terrified young woman, looking over her shoulder one last time before she vanished like a wraith in the night.


	14. Fear

Kressos is webbed with rivers and streams, like the veins of a body all bearing toward the sea. We do not have the great empty plains that stretch over a great part of Saren, that feed their mammoth and rhino herds. What we have are valleys and canyons, and marshes that might swallow you up, never to be found. There are old stories about the riverfolk, all manner of creatures that might drag you down into the mud, but they are not treated as anything more than entertainment among those who want to appear civilized. 

I traveled on a number of those rivers, when I was accepted into officers’ training. I only left my father a letter, because I knew that he would have done anything he could to stop me from leaving, and that was why I had to escape in the middle of the night, when not even the servants were awake. I took only what I could carry, and what little money I had saved.

Riverboats are the easiest way to travel great distances, and often the cheapest. I was given a cot in a hold crammed with them, and seeing my young age, the thick-armed woman who ran the boat with her husband handed me one of her cooking knives, and said I should keep it on me until I departed. My confusion must have showed, because she drew me aside with a hand on my shoulder. “You’ve not traveled before, have you?”

I shook my head, embarrassed, and she nodded. “You don’t know any of these men. And you shouldn’t trust ‘em. If anyone gives you trouble, tries to steal from you or worse, you stick ‘im in the thigh. Like so,” and she motioned to show me what she meant. “Then you come right to my kitchen before the bastard catches up to you. Understand?” 

I nodded and she patted my shoulder, and didn’t ask what I was doing alone, for which I was grateful. It isn’t just for a son to abandon his father, or a brother his sister. The academy was unlikely to send me back because of that, but it was a thought that weighed heavily on me. I had not done the just thing—but I had done the thing that would free me from my father’s grasp. If I was to have any life outside of his house, it was as a soldier. 

The journey was a slow one, as we would be fighting our way upstream to reach Gira, where I would have to find a new ship to take me north and west to Jasos. I had saved enough money that, if I was frugal, I should have yet a little left over when I reached the academy, but then I would have to be especially tight about my spending until I could secure some work in the city. My father would not be sending me any funds, I knew that well enough. 

I didn’t have any trouble aboard that boat, even if only because the warning had put enough suspicion in me to make sure I was never alone in dark corners. I spent much of my time in the mess, which was always lit, and when I slept, it was with the borrowed knife under my pillow. I was relieved to return it to the woman at Gira, and she instructed me where I could buy a knife cheaply, and that I should travel with one. 

I bought one with a whalebone handle, with a blade only as long as the length of my palm, but it seemed discreet enough, and only cost me half of what I might have spent on a meal. 

Gira is a busy city, being one of the largest river ports outside of the capitol. I spent most of a day wandering the docks, looking for the most direct and least expensive route to Jasos. 

That was how I met Kaspar Heita.

#

Tyna’s quarters were more apothecary than sleeping place. Whoever she had expected to see when she answered my knock, it was not me. Her hair was up in a knot at the top of her head, and she wore an apron that appeared to be quite old. “Commander,” she said, looking past me as if she expected someone else to be there. “What can I do for you?” 

“You said you have something to help with sleep?” I asked. 

“Yes, although,” her brows furrowed, “I would have thought Miss Sargis would have come on her own.”

“Not for her,” I said. “For me.” 

I could not have uttered a more baffling set of words to Tyna had I asked her to marry me. “…Of course. Come inside.” 

Tyna had a small fire in the hearth, over which she was cooking something that smelled like hot mud and something fiercely bitter. She took the pot from the fire with a rag, and turned to glance at me. “What’s troubling you, exactly?” 

“Staying asleep through the night,” I said, sidling closer to the fire. “I’m awake maybe two, three hours every night between going to bed and getting up in the morning.” 

Tyna nodded, and considered her shelves, filled with jars and tins all labeled in the looping Aziran script. She moved with certain efficiency, I gathered she had a system to her stores. She took a kettle from the wall and filled it with water from a pitcher, hanging it on the same hook in the hearth the pot had recently occupied. “And that chill? How long has that been bothering you?” 

I let out a breath. “Some time.” 

“Hm.” Tyna looked carefully at me, and went back to her shelves. I watched her with a mortar and pestle, and recognized the sharp sent of pepper. I thought I heard her whispering over it, though I couldn’t make out the words. She returned with a cup as the kettle was steaming. The tea smelled more pleasant than whatever she had been brewing previously, at least. “Here,” she said, “give it a couple of minutes to cool. It should help with the chill.” 

I cradled the cup in my hands as Tyna set to cleaning her mortar with a crisp white cloth. “Are you really here because Andon sent you?” 

Her hands slowed, and her eyes did not move. “What do you mean?” 

“Andon letting loose of his best hunting hound’s leash for this long, knowing that he would be unable to contact you at all through the winter… that seems unreasonable, even for him.” I sipped at the tea. It smoldered in my chest like a coal. “Something tells me I was never supposed to reach Morhall.” 

Tyna held a jar up to the light, examining its contents. Some kind of root, I thought. “Perhaps you weren’t. What of it?” 

“So what are you going to do when the spring thaw comes?” 

“Likely, I’ll deliver your child.” Tyna measured out herbs and powders I could not name. “Myself being the only midwife inside these walls.” 

“I’d ask how much she’s told you, but you wouldn’t tell me.” The chill did seem to abate some, though I couldn’t say I yet felt warm. “But I hoped you might tell me if I can expect a visit from some other hound of the prince, come springtime.” 

Tyna gave me a look that was almost pitying. “We both can, I think.” She handed me a tin. “A spoonful in a cup of hot water before bed, not more. And have someone in the kitchens get some ginger root for you. That will help with the cold. Don’t have too much of that, either, or there will be consequences for your digestion.” Tyna gazed at me for a moment, her expression hard to read. “She cares deeply for you. She’s already lost enough in her life.” 

#

Kaspar Heita would have been not quite twenty-five, when I met him. He was working the riverships from the water, then, avoiding his fiancee. It’s easy to see now that his marriage was doomed from the beginning, as Kaspar had two loves that came before anything else: liquor, and men or women he was not obliged to marry. 

I think he felt sorry for me, more than anything else. 

This was the first of Kaspar’s riverships, the seed of what would become his own shipping company. He was short a deckhand, since one had run off with a girl, and offered me free passage if I worked the trip back to Jasos. 

It wasn’t desirable work, at any rate. Even a cargo ship has its bedpots to be dealt with, emptied into foul barrels that are only removed at port. Beside that, my duties were to scrub tables and floors in the mess each night, to clean up after the rat terrier that could be heard at all hours of the night over the squealing of dying rats, and to work the pumps in the bilge if needed. 

Still, it wasn’t bad. I was the youngest member of the crew, but I didn’t feel especially out of place, beyond my inexperience. No one went out of their way to make my life unpleasant, and the dog sometimes curled up in my lap when we had a quiet moment during the day.

“I’ve heard of your family,” Kaspar said, when I told him where I was from. “What are you doing here? Is your father that cheap?” We were eating in the mess, a duck that had been shot by the cook that morning. 

“My father didn’t know I was going to leave,” I said. “He would never have let me enlist.” 

Kaspar looked at me a little differently then. I could see it in his eyes, a sort of understanding. “So you’re a runaway, then.” He gave me a bitter smile. “You’re in good company, at least. Here, have a drink.” It was the only drink he offered me the whole journey, which took us into steep canyons only just wide enough for two riverships of that size to pass each other, close enough for the men aboard to shake hands. 

The walls of the canyons dripped water onto our heads most of the day, fat drops of water sliding off of the mosses above. It inspired one to be quiet and listen, though I was never sure for what. Eventually, we would emerge on the broad river that carried us to Jasos, slow and fat and bordered by more farms than trees. 

“I’ll probably be in Jasos another couple of months,” Kaspar told me, “then I’ll be off again. If you need work while I’m in Jasos, let me know. I have a warehouse near the docks, always need extra hands.”

I thanked him, feeling considerably less uncertain about my immediate future than I had when I set out. “You’re the first friend I’ve had besides my sister.”

I half expected him to laugh, but he didn’t. He just looked sad. “You’ll make others.” 

Guiding the ship into port, I saw a man on horseback waiting for us. He looked a great deal like Kaspar, only with a squarer face and heavier frame. 

Kaspar sighed when he saw him. “My brother.” 

#

I didn’t tell Tyna that I knew exactly why I couldn’t sleep through the night. I had known that Lya left, I would wake up and find her and that damned wolf skin gone—but maybe three nights after my encounter with the strange traveler at the feast hall, I woke as she was leaving. I was quiet, I watched her. 

Lya was crouched in front of the hearth, a silhouette in the coals, hair loose over her shoulders. She drew the wolf skin over her shoulders, and what rose from the fireside was not Lya, was not any woman I knew. A wolf, white as snow, glimmering in the low light.

It looked at me then, knew I was watching. A huff and a snort, and the wolf pushed its way out the door, and disappeared. A few hours later it would return, the wolf skin would fall away, and Lya would crawl into bed already half-asleep, smelling of wood smoke and pine. If Lya knew that I had seen her, she never acknowledged it, and I was left to my own spinning head, unable to sleep. 

I told Todd what Tyna had told me. “Andon will have all winter to work himself into a frenzy.” 

Todd added wood to the fire, and wasn’t hasty in speaking. “Lya has to be gone before he gets here. Whatever else happens, we have to get her out of here.” 

Somewhere Andon wouldn’t find her. Lya’s voice, in the back of my mind: where would I go? I didn’t know where she could hide, where she would be safe. Maybe there was nowhere truly safe for her anymore. 

“I don’t know if she’ll go.” She was so ferociously stubborn. I could imagine her fighting me on this. 

“She will if she believes Veland is in danger.” Todd stood with a hand on the mantel. “The question is, will you go anywhere?”

I didn’t—couldn’t—look at him. 

“You’re not some good soldier out of the stories, Muras,” Todd said. “You don’t have to wait for Andon to kill you, just so you can have your honorable legacy.” 

“Of course not,” I muttered. “I can just go from hero to traitor.” Tripped and fell into being a war hero, that was what Lya had said. I could trip and fall into treason, too. All I had to lose was my legacy, my good name, everything I had built my adult life on. 

“We could go somewhere,” Todd said. “Azira, maybe. Or maybe one of the dozens of places between there and Luon.”

I folded my arms across the table, watching the flickering of the candle flame. “And your family?”

Todd didn’t say anything, at first. “I’m not any more useful to them dead than I am in some far off place,” he said. “All I know is that Andon’s paranoia will only get worse from here. You aren’t the first person he’s decided is dangerous, and you won’t be the last. If the king doesn’t do anything about him, Kressos will collapse from the inside.”

“That’s treasonous talk.” My heart wasn’t in it. I didn’t know what loyalty to a king meant anymore. “Lya won’t leave Saren. I know that much.” Even if she didn’t want a war, even if she saw this as a curse—and I wasn’t certain of either of those things. 

Todd let out a breath. “Well. That leaves us with precious few options, doesn’t it?” 

“I’m not talking about this right now.” I had a cup of coffee that was quickly cooling. I wanted to forget this all. I wanted to go back to my house in Kressos, wanted to live a quiet life. Perhaps I could even bear to return to Pardas, so long as it was not my father’s house. You could raise a child in a place like that, where there was no fear of snow and ice, no wolves howling at night, no snow lions sighted at the edge of town. 

Todd reached across the table, and touched my hand. “I’m not going to leave you to your death, Muras.”

#

The first thing they do, when you are a young man training to become an officer of His Majesty’s army, is make a record of you. Your age, height, weight, and so forth, to be updated once yearly until you are enlisted as a common soldier for a term of no less than three years, at the end of which point you may be promoted, if you have proven yourself to your commanding officers. Your measurements are also taken, for the issuing of an academy uniform. 

I would wager that every seamstress and tailor in Jasos earns their bread on those uniforms. Wine red and edged in black, with copper buttons that you are told to polish at the end of each day, with the expectation that one’s training officers can stop you at any moment, and see their reflection in your buttons.

So too, your bed must be neatly made according to strict requirements, your civilian clothes and uniforms neatly stored, and one’s formal white gloves kept spotless. 

“As of this moment,” a man, usually a retired commander, will tell you, “you are no longer someone’s son, someone’s brother. Before all else, you are now a soldier of the king.” 

It’s a lot of shuffling about, those first days, hardly having the time to remember anyone’s name beyond the officers, but I remembered Todd Haris. 

Todd was, at sixteen, maybe the single worst candidate for a future Kressosi officer. He was affable enough to us, his peers, but he had hardly been at the academy a week before he proved himself to be a holy terror to our instructors. 

Todd had an uncle who was a well-respected major at the time, which I believe was the only reason he was not put on a boat and immediately sent home. He spoke out of turn, had little to no care for any rules placed upon him, openly mocked our superiors, and generally proved difficult to manage. 

I, naturally, was terrified of being associated with him. I didn’t have the well-respected uncle, I didn’t even have the money to be there. My cousin Alek, my uncle’s third son, was still serving out his term as a soldier. As much as Todd resisted discipline at every turn, I was throwing myself into it. I was not going to give anyone any excuse to get rid of me. 

On the days when I was free to do as I wished, I went to Kaspar’s warehouse to work, which usually meant I was handed a broom or a crate and told to make myself useful, but sometimes it seemed that he just appreciated the company. 

“My sister hates me,” I told him, sweeping dirt out into the street. 

“She doesn’t hate you,” he said, not looking up from the ledgers, a half-finished drink still in his hand. “She’s just bitter you didn’t take her with you. Not that it would do her any good to be here, with no place to stay and no money to spend.” He put down the drink to reach for his cigarette case, which he took out to the stoop. The only self-imposed rule I ever knew Kaspar to abide by was that there would be no smoking inside his warehouse, as he absolutely could not afford a fire. His smoking was also my cue that I could stand around and just talk. 

“So,” he said, “how are you liking the military life?”

“It’s different.” I leaned in the door. “A lot different.”

“Never had to make your own bed before, I suppose.” 

I shook my head. “Never had my whole year planned out for me, either.” 

“Still better than being home?”

I nodded. I had received a number of furious letters from my father already, as had the academy itself, though they politely informed my father that as they had already decided to sponsor me for a year, they would take no further action unless I dishonored myself enough to warrant being sent home. There was always a war, Kressos always needed more soldiers. 

“So is it your mother, or your father?” 

He didn’t mean anything by the question, but it spilled out of me, then. “My mother was a kitchen maid and he sent her away. I don’t even know her name.” 

“…I see.” Kaspar paused a moment, and then offered me a cigarette. I took it.

“His wife’s a cold bitch who hates me and my sister for existing,” I said, my face warming. “If it weren’t for her, we’d still have our mother, but that was her condition, and she still doesn’t accept us.” 

“And your father?” Kaspar lit my cigarette for me. 

“All he wants is someone to inherit,” I said, not really knowing what to do with the smoke now that I had it. “He doesn’t care a bit for Tomlin, except that we’re twins. The only thing I’m supposed to care about is wine and grapes, so I don’t need friends, or anything like that.” I must have ranted on like that for half an hour, and the cigarette burned down in my hands unsmoked. Kaspar didn’t interrupt, he just let me go on like that, until I ran out of steam and felt awfully, miserably tired. 

Kaspar was on his second cigarette. He sighed when I fell quiet, head back against the brick wall. “I am my father’s biggest disappointment,” he said. “Not fit to inherit anything, not fit to make anything other than a mediocre marriage. Not honorable enough to become a soldier.” Kaspar smiled at me, dry and bitter. 

“He gave me some money to make something of myself, to get rid of me I think. I can support myself now, at least. If I start making any real money I expect some in my family will want to draw me back into the fold, but not until then. Right now, I’m the family embarrassment.” He nodded to me. “Keep that in mind, if you earn yourself a good career and reputation in the army, and all of a sudden your father doesn’t mind so much that you ran off like that.” 

#

The wind cut to the bone the night I decided to follow the wolf out of Morhall. Not wanting to know had kept me sleepless. If I was to choose between treason and death, between Lya and my king, then I had to know. I could not languish in ignorance while the winter snows piled higher around us. 

I had half expected the wolf would lead me out some secret way, but as I followed, she walked brazenly past the night guard, and they didn’t notice her. It was as if they couldn’t see her. I in my plainclothes, though, they noticed, and saluted. I waved them off, trusting that no one would ask me what I was about at this hour. Questioning a commander was well above the station of a night guard. 

I was not being especially secretive about following the wolf, but she did not look back at me even once. The wind covered over the prints in the snow, and I wondered if those, too, were invisible to my men. The wolf was in no great hurry, so I kept pace with her easily, shivering even in heavy wool. 

I didn’t recognize much of the town in the dark, so we were almost upon the lodge before I realized that’s where she was headed. The doors were close to the cold, but the wolf scratched at the door, and was let in. I made my way up to the door, waiting as long as I could bear in the cold before pulling it open and ducking inside. 

If I had expected to be noticed, I was not. Though I hadn’t been able to hear it over the wind, inside the lodge vibrated with sound. I had never seen it this full—not just of the sick and injured but the hale, too. Drumming and singing, dancing, the full-throated blasts of horns, I could hardly hear my own thoughts over it. 

And then the unmistakable low howl of a wolf. She was at the center of the lodge, cast golden in the firelight, glimmering where the snow melted in her fur, almost glowing. 

I stayed pressed up against the walls, where I was in shadow and went unnoticed. Every eye was on the wolf, even as they danced, even as they sang. 

The wolf walked out of the center, to the beds where the sick lay. She seemed to be looking for something, though she allowed people to lay hands on her as she passed, a brush over her head or back. Sometimes she would pause to sniff, to nuzzle, but then she would move on.

She stopped at the bed of an old woman, who was too weak to reach out to her. The wolf went up near the woman’s head, and I cannot entirely explain it, but it seemed to me as if some understanding passed between them.

The wolf sat back on her haunches and began to howl. The music and singing got louder, pierced now with wailing. As one of the wailers came to the old woman’s bed and lifted her limp body in their arms, I realized with something of a shock that the old woman was dead, and I was certain she had not been before. 

The wolf moved again, scanning the beds, and those who had come with the express purpose of seeing her, hoping for something. 

The wolf moved to a mother holding her young child, who was obviously quite sick, underfed and ash-faced. She sniffed at the boy and then licked at his cheek. Gradually, color returned to the boy’s face; not much, but enough that he gave a great cough and heaved in his mother’s arms, waking and looking around blearily. The woman wept in relief, hugging the boy to her chest, and saying what I thought must be thanks. 

The wolf walked to the center of the lodge again, and as I watched, stretched and transformed, the skin falling like a drape, now wrongly shaped for the body underneath it. 

Gradually, the music and singing and weeping fell quiet, expectant. 

I knew it was Lya, though her face was obscured by the head of the wolfskin, which she used to cover herself as she stood in the firelight, black hair tumbling over her shoulders. It was Lya, but the voice that came out of her mouth was not. That voice was winter, the creaking of pines in the wind, the cracking of ice. It made the skin of my arms prickle and the hair stand up on the back of my neck. 

I could not understand a word that was said, but I could watch. Lya—or whatever force moved through her—stalked about the fire, voice rising and falling in waves, and her audience responding in kind. They would shout and nod their heads in agreement, or shake their fists, seem to rage or weep. Lya moved more like an animal than a woman, this cold voice rolling out of her like ice floes down the river in the spring thaw. Her fingers were curled like claws that she cut at the air with, snarling like a feral dog. 

She shouted one last, final thing, and her audience cheered and thumped their fists on the ground. A chant went up then, and though my Sarenn was poor to nonexistent, this I did understand. 

They were chanting _Ima Vulgas.  
_

#

It was made clear to me that in the holidays between my schooling I would not be welcome home, unless it was to give up the army. So I worked, and made enough money to feed myself and pay for a cot at night. I didn’t tell anyone else at the academy how I lived in those weeks and months. Pride was a difficult resource to come by, I meant to cling on to what I had. 

Nor did I tell Tomlin, who was still unspeakably angry at me. She was lonely enough to write, but I knew better than to complain to her about anything. I told her a little of Kaspar and the men I knew at his warehouse, of Jasos and the academy and what news reached us of Saren. 

It was sometime around the winter of my first year that we learned that Saren had crowned a new king. He already had a number of wives and children, this Corasin, and so there was scarcely a print in Kressos that missed the opportunity to mock the lecherous kings of the north, hoarding women like so many cattle. 

One such paper was passed around the mess of the academy, with a caricature of a long-haired barbarian with a crown leering over his dozen or so half-dressed wives. 

The only person who didn’t laugh along was Todd, sitting on one of the tables playing cards with another two boys. He barely glanced at it, and said, “Take the braid and beard off and you could call it _‘King Isaec and all the lords’ wives.’_ ” 

I was the only one who laughed. 

Todd cast me a glance, and nodded with a smile. “Emiran’s the only one of you who isn’t a coward.”

#

I stepped outside into the cold as it seemed the gathering was ending, using the building as shelter from the wind while I waited. The wolf was the first to step out into the dark, fully transformed once more. I stepped out, where she could see me. 

The wolf stopped, and looked at me a long moment. 

“Is it you in there?” I asked. “Or something else?” 

The wolf stepped forward, and put her head under my hand, bumping it up. She huffed, grabbed the hem of my sleeve, and tugged. She was leading me somewhere, and I thought it would be unwise to refuse her. She walked just ahead of me, scanning the dark streets for something. 

She ducked into a forge where the embers still glowed a little, flickering in the draft. It was almost warm inside, sheltered as it was from the north. I had looked away for hardly a moment, and when I looked back Lya stood there, the fur pulled over herself once more, but her face was clear to me, her long black hair loose and wild. “…I suppose you want an explanation,” she said. 

I touched her cheek. “How much of that was you?” I asked softly. “Really you?”

Lya worked her fingers into the fur. “I don’t know how it works,” she said, “putting the skin on and not being seen when I don’t wish to be. It’s me, but—not. A different version of myself. That seeking out the dying, and either aiding them out or coaxing them back—that’s me, too. It’s a gift I was given, to help them. That woman, she—” Lya drew in a breath. “She was in so much pain. She just wanted it to end.”

Lya met my eyes. “That voice is not mine. He… speaks through me. I am just the messenger.” 

“I would ask what was said, but I think I have an idea.” I brushed her hair back from her face. “I just wonder if my men should be afraid to walk in the streets alone.”

“They would have these sentiments even if I were not here.”

“I know. And I know you embolden them.” My hand fell to her arm. “Who wouldn’t be emboldened, with the Mother Wolf on their side?”

Lya looked away, embarrassed. “You know the worst part?” she asked. 

“What?”

She fussed at the wolf skin again. “There’s a part of me that revels in all this,” she said. “To be powerful, to be terrifying—when I’m like that, Muras, I’m drunk on it.” Lya seemed embarrassed to admit it, as if it were something shameful. “There’s a part of me,” she said, “that hungers to be the monstrous thing men fear at night.” 

I didn’t understand, not really, but there wasn’t much I understood these days. “Let’s go back,” I said, “you’ll freeze out here.”


	15. Hunger

I’ll confess a fondness for masquerades. They are one of the few things, I think, that Saren and Kressos share an equal love for. The differences manifest in style.

Masquerades in Kressos favor a half-mask that only covers the upper or lower face—though the odd person has been known to wear a mask that covered a left or right side. I would learn, from the baffled maskmaker I approached, that Sarenn favored a full face mask, often made of wood or ivory, not the delicate feathers and paper of Kressosi masks. She agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to attempt a Kressosi-style mask for a little extra silver, though I was not promised it would turn out as I expected.

Lya kept her planned costume from me, though she shared what she was making for Veland—a stag costume with an elkhair shirt, and shoes painted to be mock cloven hooves. She had already had his mask made, a wooden deer’s face with yearling points affixed to the top, leather ears to the side, and delicate looping yellow and green lines along the forehead and cheeks. The eyes were edged in black, leading down to the nose.

“Why a deer?” I asked.

Lya shrugged. “I asked him, and it was what he wanted.” The mask had a place to hang on the wall, where it would catch me off guard in the low light near every night and morning. It was soon joined by a half-face sea eagle mask, which was what Todd had chosen.

“Has your brother ever forgiven you for not joining the king’s navy?” I asked him when I saw it.

Todd snorted. “Niklas would never have forgiven me if I had joined the navy. He was the fool who wanted to be trapped in a stinking ship for the rest of his days.”

Todd’s mask was made with hen feathers, lightly dyed to be the correct color, and the beak polished pine.

For myself, I had chosen the hunting hound. It was a costume I had worn before, one that was familiar to me. My father never hunted, but my uncle kept a small pack of sleek black hounds that I often found more agreeable company than my relatives. Some men will leave their hounds nearly wild as wolves, so vicious they kill each other as often as their prey. My uncle’s hounds were carefully trained, and gentle enough to be trusted with a baby when they were penned.

He called them his soldiers.

#

Swordsmanship was fading from any practical combat use even before I was admitted into officers’ training. Still, it was taught to us to shape our discipline—or that was what our instructors said, in any case. I think, in part, they liked a show.

I may have been the one with a kitchen maid for a mother, but the biggest bastard I ever had to fight in that mud-slick they called a yard was Todd Haris. I might have grown tall since the clutches of childhood illness had let me go, but I was yet slender, and Todd was big for his age, and faster than he had any damn right to.

But me—I was lucky. And I lasted in a fight a long time longer than I had any damn right to.

Often as not, we rarely kept our blunted sparring swords in hand for more than a minute or two. Then, it was an elbow under the chin, a head cracked into the face. Our instructors would pull us apart before we killed each other or did any real serious damage, and yet they always put us up against each other the next time. I always came away bloody, but never as badly hurt as I should have been.

“You don’t look like much,” Todd observed once, when we were both in academy hospital. “But you’re hardy.”

I snorted then, shook my head.

Todd produced a dented cigarette case from the inside of his uniform, and flicked one at me.

“How the hell did you get that in here?” I asked. Cigarettes were strictly contraband in the academy, along with any alcohol outside of what was served with dinner.

Todd tapped the side of his chin and winked, a cigarette between his teeth. He pulled out a match to light his cigarette, and then mine. I had become something of a better smoker, since that first cigarette Kaspar offered me, though my stash was kept at his warehouse, and thus only available when I worked, so it wasn’t yet a habit so much as a social activity.

“The nurses will smell it,” I said.

“Right about now,” Todd said, leaning back against the head board, “they’ll be sneaking their own cigarettes on the back step. Long as ours are out and gone by the time they get back, no harm done.” He grinned.

I fell back on the pillow, closed my eyes.

“Heard you work on the docks over holidays,” Todd said.

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked, rubbing my temple. He’d cracked me over the head with the hilt of the sword and my entire skull ached.

“Ah, someone saw you. Can’t remember who.” Todd’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Heita’s warehouse. Thought you were the kind that cared about rumors.”

I squinted at Todd. “What are you talking about?”

“Just that you’re laced so tight I’m amazed you can breathe,” he said, looking at the ceiling. “And yet on holiday you’re running about with Kaspar Heita. Couldn’t have picked more fertile ground for rumors if you’d tried.”

I pulled myself up. “What the fuck,” I hissed, “are you talking about?”

Todd laughed. “I thought you’d choke on a curse if you ever tried to say one. Anyway, you know damn well what I’m talking about.”

I crushed the cigarette in my hand. “I don’t like you enough to have any reservations about breaking your nose again, Haris.”

Todd held up his hands, pulled his cigarette away from his mouth. “All I’m saying is you could do better.”

“Heita’s a friend. That’s all.”

“Of course, of course.” Todd was still gazing at the ceiling.

“I’ll take rumor over sleeping on the street with nothing to eat,” I said. “Just because you’ve never had to work a day in your life.” I fell back again, too tired to give a damn about my pride just then. “Fucking prize pig.”

Todd laughed softly. “Been called a lot of names, but that’s a new one.” I could feel his eyes on me. “So it’s true, then.”

“What’s true?”

“The your father cut you off.”

“And where’d you hear that one?”

“Lucky guess,” Todd said. “Only one reason for someone like you to spend your holidays working.”

“That going to be the next rumor about me?” I asked.

“I only listen to gossip,” Todd said, “I don’t contribute to it.”

“You’re a son of a bitch.”

I could hear the smile in Todd’s voice. “Oh, I’ve gotten that name a lot.”

#

“Your chill hasn’t gone away?”

I shook my head, and Tyna frowned. “That is quite concerning, Commander.” She stoked the fire, though I knew it was already quite warm in her quarters. I just couldn’t feel it.

“I’m not convinced its illness,” I said.

Tyna gave me a measured look. “She has had an effect on you, hasn’t she?”

I rubbed my hands together, and gazed at the fire.

“Kressos would call me a witch-doctor, if I practiced the way I was first taught,” Tyna said. “You have to put on Aziran trappings to be taken seriously. I learned valuable skills, mind, but it’s not how I was raised.”

“How would you treat this then?” I asked. “In a Sarenn way.”

Tyna washed her hands in the basin, to take off the soot. “It would involve knowledge of your ancestors, your family’s relationship to the gods and spirits of the land… too much that you wouldn’t have answers for, before I could even begin to choose an approach.”

“Did you know that she turns into a wolf at night?” I watched the flames, wishing I could get well and truly warm. This constant cold, it was enough to make one want to thrust their hand into the fire. “And where she goes?”

Tyna took her time in answering me. “Some of the people at the lodge mentioned it to me,” she said, “how Ima Vulgas came to see them. I never went myself.”

I rubbed my face with both hands. “None of this should be possible.”

“They said that about Morhall.” Tyna poured a cup of tea. “A man who has done the impossible ought not be so resistant to seeing it.”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

Tyna was quiet a moment. “Your cousin never showed any remorse. Quite proud of his handiwork, even as he was dying. The greatest achievement of his military career.”

Since she had joined us at Nolsaford, this was the first Tyna had mentioned Alek. Her face would have been the last thing he saw in life, knowing that she had been sent for the express purpose of killing him.

“Twelve women,” Tyna said, “and a thirteenth lost in the snow. All those children. Thirteen families who lost daughters and grandchildren. That wound is still bleeding for those families. And yet, I could only kill Alek Emiran once, and not thirteen and thirty-seven times he deserved.” She looked at me, her face cool. “I know what she asks of you,” Tyna said, “and I know that to you it sounds impossible. You’re too good a soldier for that. But you hesitate, because you know Andon wants you dead. You can feel all the guilt you want, Commander, but I can’t kill you any more times than I could kill your cousin. Your death is a pittance in comparison to the crimes you have committed.”

“For a woman who kills for the prince of Kressos,” I said, “I would never have guessed you were such a loyalist.”

Tyna’s smile was tight. “You’re not the first man I’ve spared on behalf of another woman.” She handed me the cup. “Here. It should help for at least a little while.”

It burned on the way down, but it did warm me a bit.

“Are you sleeping through the night, then?”

I nodded. I didn’t need to follow Lya every night. I knew she still went, but she never seemed exhausted. I hadn’t told Todd, I couldn’t seem to find the words. Perhaps he knew, in his own way. He was even less able to speak of it.

“Good. Otherwise I’d be worried I was losing my touch.” Tyna stood, considered me. “I have a suspicion your chill won’t be resolved until you make a decision, Commander. Someone besides Miss Sargis is very interested in your answer.” She started to turn away from me, tending to her herbs.

“The man with the club foot,” I said.

Tyna’s hands froze. “The what?” she asked, soft.

“I met him in the feast hall,” I said. “Lya knew who he was, but she wouldn’t tell me his name. She—implied what he is.”

Tyna let loose what I could only assume was a stream of curses, slamming her flat hand down on the table. “Foolish, idiot woman!” she hissed. “Trying to handle all this herself. Does she think she can lie and trick her way out of everything?”

“What, and you can help?” I asked, incredulous.

“More than you can,” Tyna said, giving me a venomous look. “If you refuse to help her, Andon will be the least of your worries.”

#

Kaspar laughed, when he finally got it out of me what Todd had said. “That’s all? From the way you looked, I thought someone must have died.” He shook his head, lifting his drink. “You’re much too young for me. You’d have to be at least twenty.”

I shook my head, reviewing the ship’s ledger against the warehouse books. It was tedious work that Kaspar didn’t like to do, so he was generous with wages when I did it. He planned to purchase a second ship soon, to cover additional routes. He would need to hire a new pilot, new crew, with new books and new salaries to be paid.

“I’ll be gone during your next holiday,” Kaspar told me, and handed me a letter. “This is for the foreman at Geron’s warehouse, he knows me. He’ll give you work to do, and they have some temporary quarters in the back where you should be able to get a bed. He pays fairly, and the tavern across the street will give you a special rate for meals.”

I thanked him, tucking the letter into my coat. “I didn’t think you had a shipment then.”

Kaspar grimaced. “I don’t. I’ll be getting married.”

I had never been especially pious, but I made a sign against evil and that seemed to amuse him. “We’ll see how she adjusts to living in Jasos,” Kaspar said. “I don’t intend to buy a country estate just for her.”

I had been in the academy just over a year by then, and had impressed my instructors enough for my tuition to continue to be sponsored. I was given commendations for my dedication and discipline, and I was careful to cultivate good relationships with the visiting officers who might someday be my superiors.

Alek finished his term of soldiering, and was promoted to junior officer. He visited me at the academy, shortly afterward, though he never wrote to tell me he was coming.

I was at rifle drill, an exercise in which you are measured in efficiency and precision from loading to firing. My shooting was adequate, but it burned me to no end that Todd was the best and fastest shot of any of us.

“Emiran!” An instructor shouted, “Visitor!”

I had not received a single visitor since I arrived, and for one moment I thought my father must have come to berate me in person. It never occurred to me to expect Alek, in fresh officer’s blue with silver buttons. “Muras!” he said, slapping me on the back with an easy smile. “You started a hell of a storm.”

Alek was a good seven years older than me, and we had never been especially close, but he seemed to believe we had some sort of camaraderie now, as soldiers from the same family. What we didn’t speak about, as we discussed how I had managed to support myself without my father’s help, was how pleased my uncle must have been that I had taken off. If I refused my responsibilities to my father, my uncle’s sons stood a very good chance of inheriting a large portion of my father’s land, even if I survived my service in the army. Alek, especially, had an interest in that.

“Who are you working for, then?” Alek asked.

“Whoever will take me,” I said. It wasn’t strictly a lie. “Odd jobs. It keeps me fed and warm.”

Alek nodded. “Tomlin’s told you, then?”

I nodded. “She’s too young.”

“She’s just engaged, not wed yet,” Alek said.

“Too damned young,” I muttered. “And to Cade fucking Alby of all people.” I wanted a cigarette.

“She’ll survive,” Alek said, putting his cap on his head. “The spirit your twin has, she’d have been a commander, if she was male. And a damned tyrant of one.”

Alek didn’t stay long, he was on his way back to Pardas for a brief holiday before his commission. He was being sent to the northeast, to disputed territory. He gave me a crisp salute, a smile. “Study hard, Cousin. Your time will come soon enough.”

#

At the end of my three years of training, I was sent to serve my term near the coast, where the Lor is near a mile wide and deceptively calm until it meets the sea. We were meant to try and establish a foothold on the Saren side of the river, which would allow us to throttle the neck of Sarenn trade.

My first battle, we crossed the river under the cover of night, with the rain pouring down our backs. Crouched low on the deck of the ship, barely able to see the shore, I couldn’t imagine how anyone could see us—until the Sarenn cannons tore through us like stones through glass.

Rifle leveled on the rail, firing through the dark until the ship was split apart and I was dumped into the frigid black water. I swam for the next ship, and had to pull myself up over the side, with no weapon and hardly the strength to stand. By the time dawn crept over the horizon, we were in retreat, half our attacking force lost to the river bar crashing into the sea.

I would cross that river more times than I could care to remember in my three years there, enduring the constant damp and smell of mildew. Pneumonia plagued our garrison, and as many men drowned as died of any other cause. Everything I had learned in Jasos, I learned again on that river, certain I might die in that water.

Tomlin married in that time. I requested leave, the one and only time during my service as a foot soldier that I would. It was the first time in five years that I had returned to Pardas.

It was strange to see it again, dry and warm, open hills of vineyards. I stood a long time on the road outside my father’s house, roughly where my mother had used to watch Tomlin and I, marveling at how the vines didn’t tower the way they did in my memory. I was in uniform, and must have been recognizable from the house. Tomlin came out onto the back step, a tall reed of a woman in pale yellow, arms folded.

I made the walk through the vineyard, my bag under my arm. Tomlin’s hair was loosely tied, draped over her shoulder, still as fine and pale as un-dyed silk. “You’re late,” she said, as I drew close enough to hear.

I nodded, let out a breath. “It’s good to see you, Tomlin.”

She had our mother’s face, I could see now, and I supposed I must have, too—soft-edged, with our father’s hard eyes. Tomlin came down off the step, and put her arms around my shoulders, chin pressed into my coat. “I missed you, little brother.” She stepped back, looked me up and down. “You look like a soldier, anyway.” She gave me a little shove. “You’ve grown into your height.”

“You haven’t,” I replied. “I’ve seen broom handles more substantial than you.”

Tomlin smiled. “They feed you more meat in the army, that’s all.” She took my arm. “You’ll have to face him sooner or later.”

“Between you and me, I’d be just as happy to sleep in the vineyard and watch your wedding from the hill.”

“I’d join you, if I could.” She leaned into my side, looked sad for a moment. “He’s not… a bad man.” We weren’t talking about our father anymore.

We didn’t either of us bring up that her betrothed was notorious in Pardas, that he had once beaten a man within an inch of his life. If he had ever laid a hand on a woman, I would have come back just to kill him before he could marry my sister. “If he ever raises a hand to you,” I said.

“You’ll be too far away,” Tomlin said. “By the time you hear of it, I’ll already be a widow.”

I nodded, and paused before she could take me into the house. “This seems like a good time to give you your wedding present.” I reached into my bag, pulling out the box.

Tomlin looked at it a long moment before she opened it. “Every bride needs a pistol, I suppose,” she said.

“It’s heavier than you think,” I said. “Promise me you’ll practice with it. Discreetly.”

“I will,” she said. “But I don’t think you have anything to worry about, Muras. He’ll never lay a hand on me. He’s not stupid enough to try.” She closed the box, and handed it back to me. “Keep it for now. Otherwise they’ll want to know what it is.”

It was an uncomfortable week, where my father did not speak to me, and Tomlin was kept busy with her wedding. Her husband-to-be was noticeably uneasy around me, and I made no effort to reassure him. Better that he was afraid of me. Better that he knew I would make him suffer if any harm came to my sister.

Tomlin was wed, and I returned to the north for another year. Men died, ships were lost. I was promoted, and allowed six months leave before my next assignment.

I decided not to return to Pardas, but to Jasos. I had not seen Kaspar Heita in three years, and though I had only a vague idea of what I would do in Jasos, I thought I would be able to fill six months there without being nearly as miserable as I would be in Pardas. I wrote, to ask if I could take a job while I was there. Kaspar wrote back quickly and enthusiastically that I was welcome to take a room in his house if I liked, that he would be happy to see me again.

He met me down on the docks when I arrived, and I saw the moment he recognized me—not a little surprised. “Good gods,” he said, clapping me on the shoulders, and it surprised me as much as it did him that we were of a height now. “You’ve changed, haven’t you?”

#

I understood more what Lya meant about distracting from the winter with this feast. The last time I had lived through the interminable nights of a deep north winter my men had been starving, walking off into the snow to die. To simply be sitting through the dark, to feel it closing around you like the circling of scavenging wolves—that, too, was enough to make one walk out into the night and not return.

A few hours of daylight, no more, and all of it biting cold and wind-ridden.  
The week of midwinter was marked by the appearance of bonfires in the wider streets, which burned all day and night. I began to notice more animals being slaughtered as well, sacrificed to gods and making sure the fodder for the remaining animals lasted until spring. I disliked to look out to the fields where the slaughter took place and stained the snow red.

What would it do to someone, to spend each and every winter like this, feeling the jaws close around your throat? It might make a monster out of anyone.

My men were kept busy salting the walls and the stone steps of Morhall to keep the ice from building up. They shivered in their wool and furs standing watch, and lit their own bonfires just to keep warm.

Wolves, lions, and ravens scavenged the offal of the sacrificed animals. It looked like a battlefield with no men, only the abandoned guts and heads of livestock, frost-rimed and scattered.

I heard sounds I shouldn’t have been able to hear. Crying children in empty rooms, women wailing and begging words that I couldn’t understand. I did not let myself stay alone for long, no matter what I was doing.

There were ghosts stirring in Morhall that I did not want to face. And I was cold, always cold.

When Lya looked at me, it was as if she already knew. She never asked about my odd behavior, why I never felt warm. She just went back to her stitching, working on her masquerade costume that she wouldn’t let me see.

#

Kaspar’s wife had left his home in Jasos before the birth of their second child. She lived then in his family’s home, with their son and daughter. So far as I could tell, Kaspar missed his children a great deal more than he would ever miss his wife.

“She didn’t adjust well to Jasos, then.”

“No,” Kaspar said, “I suppose not.”

Things were different between us in a way I could not quite express. Perhaps, I thought, it was only that I was different. I had gotten used to the rigid hierarchies of the army, and the more lax atmosphere of merchantry and business that I encountered with Kaspar left me at a loss.

Or perhaps it was something else.

Kaspar had nine cargo ships, he told me as we rode in his new carriage, and two passenger boats. He was investing money in gunsmithing as well, which kept his books comfortable enough that he no longer needed to take out loans to purchase new ships. He had paid off his debts, and for the time being, business was good. He no longer went on route with any of his ships, there was too much to oversee in Jasos. In my absence, he had become something of a society man.

“I expected it and I still find it strange,” he said, “how much more interested in you everyone is once your fortunes turn around.”

I wasn’t sure what to do, what to say to him. We were friends, I thought, but now I wasn’t so sure what was allowed, and what was not.

“I’ll be glad to have your company,” Kaspar said. “It gets too quiet in that house.”

I would like to say that there was any sort of gradual falling together, some sort of charm or draw. In reality, I suppose, we were both lonely when we first fell into bed together.

For six months, I was the prince of Kaspar’s household. I was never entirely comfortable with it, but I thrived on the attention. Kaspar took me to a few parties, asked me to wear my uniform. Stand straight and tell a few stories, that’s all it takes to entertain when there are no other military men around.

I had stories enough. I had a new scar that would soon fade, just over my right ear, where a musket ball had scraped me, and killed the man just behind me. Hardly more than a smear of scar tissue, and most often invisible under my hair, but Kaspar would trace the line of it sometimes, seemed to know where it was more than I did.

He still drank as much as I remembered, but he was more bitter than when we had first met. Kaspar left me in his house once or twice a month to visit his children, and always seemed to come back in a worse mood than the one had been in when he left. He never talked about his wife or his family with me. I never asked.

For that half year I was there, Kaspar held his father and brothers at arm’s length. His brothers visited his house in Jasos sometimes, casting furtive glances in my direction as they discussed purchasing shares in his shipping company, which Kaspar flatly refused. He didn’t need their money, he told them, and they wouldn’t have his.

Six months. It seemed like such a long time then, and we never discussed what would happen when it was time for me to return to my commission. I suppose we both knew that this had never been meant to last.

“They’re sending me to the midlands,” I told him, “I suppose I’ll finally see a mammoth.”

Kaspar nodded, seemed distracted. “Take care of yourself,” he said. “I would hate to hear of something happening to you.” He paused, watching me pack, and folded his arms. “One more thing.”

“Yes?”

“When you make a hero of yourself,” Kaspar said, “and your family comes calling to make amends, tell them to go fuck themselves.”

#

It snowed, that midwinter night. The way to the feast hall was lit with glowing lanterns that melted the snow around them, dripping onto the heads of passersby. Lya had gone ahead in the daylight to prepare, and by the time I reached the feast hall it fairly glowed with the fires within and without.

Masked faces hurried around the place, all manner of beasts and monsters flickering in the low light, some more extravagant than others.

The elk were penned alongside the hall, out of the wind, with plenty of hay and water. I took my mask off of the saddle, carefully shaped fabric on a frame, which captured the lean look of my uncle’s hounds better than I could have hoped for. It fit neatly over my head, and matched well with the spare black clothing I had chosen for the occasion.

There was music within the hall already, Sarenn and Kressosi packed in shoulder to shoulder, hardly enough room to walk, let alone dance, but that didn’t seem to stop anyone.

Todd was easy enough to find, his shirt had been given wings of dyed turkey feathers, and he wore gloves on his hands with the fingers stitched in yellow fabric to make talons. It did not take me long to spot Veland, either, the young stag running with a gang of children in costumes that had probably been handed down to them by their brothers and sisters.

I could not find Lya, not just then.

“You could stand to show any sense of display, Commander,” a voice at my shoulder said.

Tyna had clad herself as a snow lioness in full winter mane, the shaggy fur piled over her shoulders and down her back. She tipped up the pale wooden mask and gave a dry smile. “It was Miss Sargis’ idea. I quite like it.” She looked over my costume. “It’s clear she didn’t spend any time on you.”

“Do you know where she is?” I asked.

“You’ll see her soon enough,” Tyna said, pulling her mask back down. Her green eyes seemed almost to glow in the firelight. “And you’ll know it’s her.”

I suppose I felt— _off-balance._ I made my way through the crowd to Todd. There was no raised dais for the officer’s table, we were all at the same level, pressed shoulder to shoulder and elbow to elbow.

Todd saw me and pulled his mask up, so I did the same. “Hello,” he said, grasping me by the elbow with a smile. “Quite the thing, isn’t it?”

“It is.” The air smelled of roasting food and smoke. Todd put a cup of wine in my hand. “Where did this come from?” I asked

“May have brought along a cask from the cellars,” Todd said, “thought the officers would rather have that than beer.”

I took a sip, watching the tables fill as young women and men came out bearing huge plates and bowls of roast elk and pig surrounded with garlic and onion, heaping wild rice and root vegetables and potatoes, and barrels of beer and cider. Nothing was touched just yet, they seemed to be waiting for something.

“Looks like we had better take our places,” Todd said.

The hall grew quiet, anticipatory.

The doors from an ante room opened, and I understood what Tyna had meant.

The mask was polished bone, shining in the firelight, a wolf’s head lined in deep red. Teeth curled down toward her throat, the bottom of the mask casting a long shadow. The eyes were dark hollows, and her hair was wrapped in white silk, with ice blue beads that trailed down to the shoulders of her dress. White, except for the shock of bloody red trailing down her chest.

There were stones on my chest, I could not breathe.

Lya moved to the front of the hall, with her back to me. She raised one hand in the air, and began to speak, in both Sarenn and Kressosi. “Welcome,” she said, “and luck be with you all. We have made it to the longest night, and for that, we should give thanks. It is no small thing, to survive winters such as this.”

Lya spoke slowly, carefully, making sure she was understood. “Our stories here in Saren tell us that the world was born out of a winter like this. A winter without summers, painted white even in the blackest night. Only the heat of the sun, affixed to the lines of Mother Spider’s web, gave us the thaw of spring, and all green growing things. The sun has reached the center of the web, my cousins, and tonight she shall begin her journey back out, golden and glorious to bring color into the world once more.”

She paused, masked face turning across the entire hall. “Drink for your loved ones tonight, for those who yet live and those who do not. Those who came before will be here with us tonight, as close as our own breaths. Remember that we are those who have braved the terrible winter, and we shall see it end. Drink, eat, have cheer! Summer is coming, and we are here to guide it in.”

There was some shouting of agreement, a little applause as she finished. I was too aware of the air surrounding the soldiers, imagining what they thought of Lya dressed like that, making that kind of speech. It wasn’t hard to hear the mutterings that they already thought I was too permissive—that I ought to be better at managing her.

I took a swallow of wine, and tried not to think.

#

We did still write, Kaspar and I. Sometimes months would pass without a word between us, but then one of us would pick up a pen, and it was as natural as breathing.

I was given a new assignment in the east, where there was particular trouble with Sarenn men crossing the river in raids. There was something of a lull in my communications with Kaspar at that time, I had been distracted with the internal politics of the army, but it was quite soon after I arrived that I would write to him again.

_That smug son of a bitch Haris is here._

I didn’t understand how I could have such bad luck, running into Todd again after some five and a half years out of training.

Worse, he recognized me right away.

“Emiran!” He slapped me on the shoulder, as if we were old friends. “Good to see you. Where’ve you been all this time?”

“Fighting, like I imagine you’ve been doing.”

“Of course,” Todd laughed, “but I’ve been scrambling over rocky mountains and cutting my boots to bits. You?”

“Drowning in the Lor,” I said. “In the sand and the mud.”

I wasn’t especially surprised to learn that Todd commanded a host of riflemen. Their purpose here was to scout the forests and drive back any Sarenn they found. “It’s damned difficult, the way those bastards know the forest,” Todd said. “You can be exchanging fire for an hour and you’re lucky if you see them at all.”

Todd looked at me for a moment, thoughtful. “I imagine you’ll be given a river command. Damned dangerous, they like to shoot down at you from the hillsides.”

“I suppose I’ll have to keep an eye out then,” I said, shrugging him off.

Todd looked at me a moment, and nodded toward a central building within the fort. “Major’s in there. He’ll be wanting to see you, I imagine.”

Todd’s prediction proved true enough, I was given a narrow slip of a riverboat, and a small group of men with which to scout the narrow tributaries of disputed territory. I was given orders to drive back any Sarenn I found, soldier or civilian. If we were to gain foothold in this mountainous country, it would start with the rivers.

Long, dull days on those waters, looking for enemies we seldom saw. We heard gunfire in the distance sometimes, but never more than a shot or two at a time, and too distant for me to spare men to search it out. We met up with other Kressosi men in the area, shared news. It might be three weeks or more between our returns to the fort, to resupply and update our superiors.

One of the other ships was attacked a few days before I made it back from an expedition. The only two survivors made it back to the fort on foot, a festering musket ball in the shoulder of one. He would ultimately die from infection, a miserable painful death.

I was summoned by the Major, and told to take a squad of riflemen to the place where the boat had been attacked. “May I make a request, sir?” I asked, reluctantly. “Officer Haris is the best marksman I know. I’d like to take his team.” Given the choice between tolerating Haris in the close confines of a riverboat, and suffering the same slow death of the man who had survived the initial Sarenn attack, Todd narrowly edged out agonizing infection.

“If I didn’t know any better, Emiran,” Todd said as we loaded the boat, “I’d think you were warming up to me.”

“Let any of my men die and I’ll hang you with your own guts,” I replied.

“I’ve only lost one man in the four years I’ve been here,” Todd said, “I don’t intend to let that number get any higher.”

I had learned to read the river, to see the snags just under the surface of the water, and listen for the rapids that would rip out even the shallow draft of our boats if improperly navigated. I watched the water, and Todd watched the canyon walls. I don’t know what he saw, it couldn’t have been more than a flash, but he gave a shout and his riflemen snapped guns to shoulder, taking aim. “Keep us steady, Emiran!” he called to me, as the first shot echoed from somewhere above us.

I had hardly enough time to give the order to my oarsmen to hold the boat when Todd’s men fired. We were just above a rapids that would make splinters of us if we hit them. I could see timber from the attacked boat tossed up on the rocks. “Hold steady! Hold!”

“There, in the trees!” Todd shouted, and the riflemen adjusted their aim. I saw a man tumble from the branches, and disappear among the pine.

I saw something then, hardly more than a glint. “Haris!” I shouted, “The rocks!”

Todd whirled, rifle to shoulder, and took hardly more than a moment to shoot the man who had come to the river’s edge to get a clear shot at us. He gave a shout and put a hand up in the air, and his riflemen fell quiet.

All I could hear was the rushing of the water, nothing else.

“Just two men?” I asked, as Todd lowered his rifle. “Two men with muskets?”

“You ever ask yourself why they don’t buy better weapons when they’re so cozy with Azira,” Todd said, “that’s why. Far as they’re concerned, they don’t need ‘em.” He scanned the trees for a moment, and nodded. “I think that will be all we’ll hear from them, but maybe we should camp overnight, just to be sure?” He looked to me. “It’s your riverboat, I’ll leave the choice to you.”

I paused, considered my men, and nodded. “We’ll camp tonight,” I said, “and post a watch.”

We saw nothing else except a bull elk that the men shot and butchered for our dinner. I found Todd smoking at the edge of the trees, and joined him. He glanced at me, and pulled a flask from his coat pocket to offer me a drink, which I accepted with a nod. “You sent scouts to look at the bodies,” I said.

Todd nodded. “I like to be sure.” He grimaced, shook his head. “One that was up in the tree wasn’t much more than about fifteen. If the shot didn’t kill him the ground did.”

“They brought back trophies,” I said, a measure of reproach in my voice. Todd’s scouts had come back with bloodied braids in their hands, and showed them off to the others.

Todd sighed. “What’s it matter to you?” he asked. “You think the Sarenn don’t take trophies?”

“I’ve never known the Sarenn to cut the trophies off of a dead man’s body,” I said. I knew well enough that they took other things—the silver brocade off a uniform, a cap, boots if they needed them.

Todd put his cigarette out on the river rocks. “I’m telling you this because I like you, Emiran,” he said, “you can’t be seen to care about them. You can feel whatever you like, but you can’t let anyone think you give a damn. If you do, you won’t get good assignments, you won’t get promoted—like as not your men will let you get killed. See how far your care for the Sarenn takes you then.”

#

It was maybe two years after the war that Kaspar first mentioned Lya in a letter to me. A Sarenn maidservant in his house, she liked to tell stories. That was all he said about her, didn’t even tell me her name, but the mention made it worth noticing. I had read enough of his letters to sense the warmth and fondness.

Kaspar would mention this woman a few times, over the years. She was clever, she was gracious. She had bleak moods that she would never explain, and it pained him. He was desperately, painfully in love with her.

I was keeping myself busy, rooting out Sarenn resistance. It was Todd, forced me to take leave. Told me he was retiring, and if I wasn’t going to come with him for at least a while, he would find someone else to keep him company.

We settled into the house I had bought and only seen once, and I took it upon myself to visit Jasos again. It seemed the right time to visit old friends, and I had missed river travel.

I chose to walk to Kaspar’s house, because it was not often I got to walk out of uniform anymore, to observe, to simply be another person on the street.

I could have found my way to Kaspar’s house in the dark, even with how many years it had been since I had visited. I went right up to the door, and rang the bell.

I knew her the moment she opened the door, earthy dark eyes and a delicate face, maybe the most beautiful woman I had ever seen, with a guarded expression.

“You must be Lya,” I said. “Kaspar’s told me about you.”


End file.
